This article explores how legal intermediaries facilitate or inhibit so-cial change. We suggest the increasing complexity and ambiguity of legal rules coupled with the shift from government to governance pro-vides legal intermediaries greater opportunities to influence law and social change. Drawing from new institutional sociology, we suggest rule intermediaries shape legal and social change, with varying de-grees of success, in two ways: (1) law is filtered through non-legal logics emanating from various organizational fields; (2) law is professionalized and increasingly fil-tered through and by non-legal professionals with varying degrees of connection to law. We draw from case studies in the United States and France to show how intermediaries facilitate or inhibit social change.