Associate Professor Tiffany Atkins L'11 spoke with the popular online news source covering the American legal profession for a report on the expectations of young attorneys starting their careers.
An Elon Law professor who has published on the traits and values of Generation Z was prominently featured by a popular legal profession news organization in a report on the expectations of young attorneys just starting their careers.
In “Gen Z Attorneys Are Here. Is The Legal Industry Ready?”, Associate Professor Tiffany Atkins L’11 describes in detail for Law360 Pulse how those law students born in the late 1990s and early 2000s bring a different set of priorities to their early careers than attorneys of previous generations.
“For Gen Z it’s life-work balance, it’s not work-life balance,” Atkins told reporter Anna Sanders for the story. “They are looking for places where their lives are what they prioritize, not the work.”
Atkins also reflected in the story on the need for law firms to consider adopting more equitable and transparent pay practices. “If how frequently they share grades with one another in law school is any indication of how they will share their salaries/bonuses in firms, leaders should begin practicing equitable pay practices now to attract and retain equity-minded Gen Zers,” Atkins said.
Atkins graduated from Elon Law in 2011 as the recipient of the David Gergen Award for Leadership and Professionalism. She is a member of the Board of Governors of the Society of American Law Teachers, a community of law teachers, law school administrators, librarians, academic support experts, students, and affiliates “working for more than 40 years to improve the legal profession, the law academy and expand the power of law to under-served communities.”
At Elon Law, Atkins has received national attention for her 2020 article “#ForTheCulture: Generation Z and the Future of Legal Education” in the Michigan Journal of Race and Law. She was bestowed with the 2022 ALWD Diversity Award by the Association of Legal Writing Directors during a July conference organized by the Legal Writing Institute.
Atkins also is Elon Law’s inaugural Dean’s Faculty Fellow for Equity & Inclusion.