Category Archives: Legal Profession
May 25, 2015 Rebecca RoipheLegal Profession
This is a bad time for the police officers. Last year, a series of cases in New York federal court exposed the NYPD’s stop and frisk policy as unlawful and racially biased. Following the shooting in Ferguson and the death of Eric Garner in Staten Island, thousands took to the streets to protest. The prosecutors in these two cases were widely criticized as well for failing to obtain indictments against the officers. Many wondered whether the prosecutors were complicit in a system fraught with inequality and prejudice. Secretary of State, Hilary Clinton, responded that the criminal justice system is “out of balance.” In a new article, Russell Gold argues that we can help restore the reputation of the criminal justice system by implementing what he calls, “administrative suppression.”
Administrative suppression would require prosecutors to decline to use illegally seized evidence even if courts would rule the evidence admissible. Prosecutors, in other words, have a constitutional and ethical obligation not to use evidence seized in violation of an individual’s Fourth Amendment rights. In the past few decades, the Court has radically restricted the scope of the exclusionary rule, and as a result, illegally seized evidence is often admissible in criminal cases. Gold argues that these decisions only pertain to the judicial branch. Rather than exploit the increasingly weak remedy to obtain more convictions, prosecutors, in their role as arbiters of justice and agents of the executive branch, should respond by refusing to use the tainted evidence in their cases. Continue reading "Are Prosecutors the Constitution’s Gatekeepers?"
Apr 27, 2015 John FloodLegal Profession
Ronit Dinovitzer & Bryant Garth,
Lawyers and the Legal Profession, (
UC Irvine School of Law Research Paper No. 2015-19), available at
SSRN.
One of the main concerns of the authors is the structure of the legal profession in which perpetual reproduction of hierarchies forms a contest among different elements of the profession. The configuration of the profession shapes its research which places corporate lawyers and firms at the top of the hierarchy. This seems to stem from the early Cravath idealisation of law firm development. Even though the Cravath model dates from the late 19th century, it reverberates still in the 21st century and has captured scholars’ thinking. It appears difficult to shake off these established idealisations and models when discussing the legal profession. Dinovitzer and Garth (D&G) endeavour to show how these cleavages rip through the study of legal professions.
“Lawyers and the Legal Profession” draws on the research done on the structure of the legal profession, its divisions, lawyers’ backgrounds (gender, ethnicity, class), law firms and globalisation. The range is broad but there is one caveat, which is most of the work referred to is based on research done within the US. It is legitimate to question this given the global differences between legal professions, regulatory systems and the like. Although the Cravath model might have been the blueprint for law firm organisation that was exported by American lawyers—and its residues are apparent—whether it remains the dominant model is open and contested, even, perhaps, within the US. See, for example, the rise of the “smart” law firm (Wald). I return to this later. Continue reading "The New World Order for Lawyers and the Legal Profession(s)"
Mar 5, 2015 W. Bradley WendelLegal Profession
One of the most interesting things written about professional responsibility in 2014 is not a book or a law review article, but the report of an internal investigation. Anton Valukas, a former United States Attorney, now chair of the Chicago law firm Jenner & Block, was retained by the board of directors of General Motors to investigate the company’s inadequate response to reports of a serious defect in some of its cars. As extensively reported, a faulty ignition switch used in several G.M. cars, including the Chevrolet Cobalt and Saturn Ion, would sometimes fail in a way that both shut off the engine and disabled the car’s airbags. The switch departed from its intended design in a crucial respect – the torque was less than specified, so that if a driver inadvertently bumped into it, or if the keys hanging from the ignition switch were too heavy, the electrical system might change from “run” to “accessory” mode. As early as 2005, G.M. started to receive reports of crashes in which the car’s airbags failed to deploy. At first they did not suspect a problem, as there were other factors that might have caused the airbags to fail to deploy. It was also hard to track down the problem because the engineer who had approved the original, faulty switch also approved a change to the switch design that solved the problem, but did so in a way that obscured the original problem. But by about 2007, it was becoming clear that there might be a defect in the electrical system of certain car lines. Finally, in early 2014, G.M. publicly disclosed the defect, began recalling as many as 2.6 cars, and established a compensation fund for the victims of switch-related accidents.
What happened between 2007 and 2014? The long and short of it is, evidence of a possible defect was fed into the machinery of a cumbersome, bureaucratic process that churned on and on without moving toward a resolution. G.M. did not set about to cover up the problem. It has a byzantine structure of review programs, tracking systems, and cross-disciplinary committees that exists precisely to detect and rectify issues like the ignition switch defect. Customer satisfaction issues, which comes to the attention of G.M. personnel involved in marketing, are supposed to get directed to engineers for improvement, coded for whether the problems are a mere annoyance or a possible safety concern. Managers from divisions of products, systems, and safety engineering periodically met with business managers to work on solutions to safety problems and overcome roadblocks. Additional committees dealt with problems manifesting themselves in the field, and had contact with representatives from engineering, marketing, business, and legal teams. Reading the description of these procedures and protocols, one comes away with the impression of a company that takes its obligations to customers quite seriously, but in reality the redundancy and ambiguity inherent in the structure sapped the energy from the company’s response. With multiple committees dealing with various aspects of the same problem, no person or centralized team had responsibility for making sure something got done. CEO Mary Barra memorably testified before Congress about the “G.M. nod,” when everyone in the room agrees with a proposed plan of action, but no one does anything to make it happen, and the “G.M. salute,” which consists of crossed arms with fingers pointing toward others, to whom responsibility is being punted. The human cost of this dithering can be measured in the injuries and deaths that would have been prevented if prompt corrective action had been taken. Continue reading "Not Business as Usual for In-House Counsel"
Jan 28, 2015 Susan FortneyLegal Profession
Over the last three decades organized bar groups and law firms have embraced the value of diversity, taking steps to promote diversity among ranks of lawyers. These diversity initiatives fall short when they do not include the interests of lawyers in different groups. One group that is often ignored is comprised of lawyers with disabilities. That is one of the reasons that I especially liked this article.
Professor Long’s article is a welcome addition to the scholarship on diversity in the legal profession. It addresses important issues that deserve attention, providing insightful observations on the connection between professional responsibility and the inclusion and treatment of lawyers with disabilities. Specifically, the article examines the inextricable link between lawyers’ professional responsibility under the ethics rules, professionalism, and the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) provisions that require reasonable accommodations for persons with disabilities. Continue reading "Beyond Diversity Rhetoric: Understanding the Link between Professional Responsibility and Reasonable Accommodations for Lawyers with Disabilities"
Dec 18, 2014 John FloodLegal Profession
Nick Robinson,
When Lawyers Don’t Get All the Profits: Non-Lawyer Ownership of Legal Services, Access, and Professionalism (Harv. Law Sch. Prog. Legal Prof., Research Paper No. 2014-20)
, available at SSRN.
To what extent lawyers should control their own profession, determine its rules, and be the arbiters of who should deliver legal services is a question that is increasingly subject to intense scrutiny. More jurisdictions are considering whether to follow the leads of Australia and England and Wales in liberalizing their legal professions. Canada, for example, is one of the most recent.
The American legal profession expresses significant concern about non-lawyer ownership of law firms. Both the American Bar Association and the New York State Bar Association have dealt with the issue and will probably continue so to do. Continue reading "The Relevance of Professionalism in a Post-Legal Services Act World"
Nov 18, 2014 Amy SalyzynLegal Profession
“When did the future switch from being a promise to a threat?”
–Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters: A Novel
The legal profession is often criticized as disinterested, if not fearful, of innovation in the delivery of legal services. As Benjamin Barton observes in the introductory chapter of his forthcoming book, Glass Half Full: The Decline and Rebirth of the Legal Profession: “Law may have changed less than any other area of the economy between 1850 and today. The same basic product is being sold and the same basic service is being performed.” But, as Barton quickly notes, “[n]o one dodges the reaper forever.” Through the next thirteen chapters, Barton proceeds to provide an insightful parsing of the past, present and potential future course of the American legal profession.
In homage to Larry Ribstein’s influential article, “The Death of Big Law”, Barton discusses current challenges faced by American lawyers through four different lens: “death from above”, “death from below”, “death from the state”, and “death from the side”. Although space constraints preclude a full exploration of the detailed analysis presented in the book, a brief summary of each of these four “deaths” follows: Continue reading "There’s No Time Like the Present for Some Optimism about the Future"
Oct 17, 2014 Nick RobinsonLegal Profession
Bhargavi Zageri,
Notes from the Field: How India’s Corporate Law Firms are Influencing Her Legal, Policy and Regulatory Frameworks, HLS Program on the Legal Profession Research Paper No.2014-19, 2014,
available at SSRN.
Just as there has been a striking growth in scholarship on Indian law in recent years, there has also been a blossoming of writing on the Indian legal profession. Some of this writing has been less academic, and targeted at Indian lawyers themselves. Fitting the growing affluence of the Indian bar, there are now at least three online publications –Legally India, Bar & Bench, and Livelaw – that provide the latest news of the day about law firms, judges, law schools, and well known advocates in India. At the same time, a number of scholars, both inside and outside of India, have begun writing extensively on different aspects of the profession.
For example, in recent years Jayanth Krishnan has written on the motivations for the creation of “peel-off” law firms in the Indian corporate bar, Swethaa Ballakrishnen on women’s relative success in Indian corporate law firms, Pavan Mamidi on small town lawyers, Umakanth Varottil on the growth of the M&A bar in India, Abhinav Chandrachud on the motivations of Indian Supreme Court clerks, Greg Shaffer, James Nedumpara, and Aseema Sinha on building India’s legal capacity for international trade disputes, and David Wilkins and Mihaela Papa on how globalization has impacted the legal profession in India. Much, although certainly not all, of this recent writing on the Indian legal profession has taken place as part of the Globalization, Lawyers, and Emerging Economies (GLEE) Project at the Center on the Legal Profession (CLP) at Harvard Law School (full disclosure: I am currently a fellow at CLP and have contributed to the GLEE project). Continue reading "On the Rise of Lawyers in Lobbying in India"
Sep 15, 2014 Sida LiuLegal Profession
In the past a few decades, feminization has been one of the most notable developments in the legal profession worldwide. From Continental Europe to North America, from Latin America to Asia, research has shown a rapid increase in the proportion of female lawyers in vastly different national and legal contexts (see Kay and Gorman 2008 for a review). Yet few existing studies provide a good cross-national comparison of the global trends of lawyer feminization. Despite the enduring structural barriers in recruitment, compensation, and promotion that women face in law firms and other elite legal institutions, they have continued to enter the bar in vastly different social contexts. What are the driving forces behind the feminization of lawyers? And how does this process vary from one country to another?
Using data on lawyer populations and gender compositions assembled from national censuses and lawyer statistics in 86 countries, Ethan Michelson’s recent study offers a comprehensive and convincing analysis of the relationship between bar expansion and lawyer feminization. Despite large variations of legal systems and lawyer demographics across different countries, Michelson finds a highly consistent pattern, that is, almost no country’s legal profession has attained a feminization level of at least 30% of women before its lawyer density (i.e., lawyer/population ratio) surpassed a level of 2,000 people per lawyer. In other words, feminization is part of some larger demographic changes in the legal profession worldwide. Continue reading "Just the Beginning: Studying the Global Demography of Lawyers"
Aug 1, 2014 Carole SilverLegal Profession
Andrew M. Perlman,
A Behavioral Theory of Legal Ethics, 90
Ind. L.J. (forthcoming 2014), available at
SSRN.Andy Perlman’s timing couldn’t be better. His new article, A Behavioral Theory of Legal Ethics, comes out just as negative reports of lawyers’ conduct are front page news again, this time as part of the GM story. The company’s lawyers failed to save their business and engineering colleagues from disastrous decisions; in fact, their conduct may have hindered GM from addressing problems systemically. While corporation counsel generally are not the sole check on ethical and competent decision making by company insiders, they certainly are positioned structurally to a framework that is intended to lead to good decision making. But it is not just corporate lawyers who are an issue for ethical conduct, of course. Prosecutors’ failure to reveal exculpatory evidence is a continuing concern, tax lawyers’ gaming the tax shelter system is the topic of a new book by Mitt Regan and Tanina Rostain (Confidence Games), and there are many more examples.
What makes Perlman’s article so timely is not simply the focus on lawyers’ failed judgments but his connection of these to a fundamental problem with the theory underlying legal ethics. This connection provides a larger context for considering ethical failures, moving beyond the particular characteristics of an individual to a general framework that spans lawyers’ individual differences and practice settings. According to Perlman, the theoretical foundation of legal ethics assumes that lawyers “are simultaneously capable of partisanship on behalf of clients while remaining sufficiently objective to ensure that their own conduct is ethical.”(p.6) In fact, the Model Rules of Professional Conduct obligate both partisanship (“in the sense of being aligned with a particular side of a matter” (p.6)) (see, for example, Model Rules of Professional Conduct 1.2) and the ability to consider the consequences of being a partisan in the context of obligations owed to non-clients (see, for example, Model Rules of Professional Conduct, Preamble and Scope (“Virtually all difficult ethical problems arise from conflict between a lawyer’s responsibilities to clients, to the legal system and to the lawyer’s own interest in remaining an ethical person while earning a satisfactory living.“). Nevertheless, this tension has not been adequately explored, according to Perlman: “Rarely,” he writes, do legal ethicists “discuss[] … whether this assumption relies on an accurate model of human behavior.” (p.11) It is just such a disconnect that has been identified as underlying the failings of GM’s lawyers according to a New York Times report, which commented that “It is not clear whether any of G.M.’s lawyers even recognized there was an issue with how they were representing the company. Nor is it clear that they considered whether they needed to take action to protect it from greater harm.” Continue reading "Introducing a Dose of Reality: Broadening the Perspective of Legal Ethics to Include Social Science Research"
Jul 7, 2014 Laurel TerryLegal Profession
I don’t know about you, but I am sucker for technology and “Big Data” stories. I was glued in front of my television when IBM’s Watson took on Jeopardy’s reigning champion Ken Jennings–and won. I am interested in the work of scholars such as Dan Katz and initiatives such as ReInvent Law™ and LawWithoutWalls.™ When NPR and the New York Times ran stories about how technology may do a better job than lawyers for certain tasks such as e-discovery, I emailed those stories to friends and colleagues. My ears perk up when I read about the coming “disruption” to the legal profession. I often recommend to others Richard Susskind’s book entitled The End of Lawyers? about the impact of technology on legal services.
Regardless of whether you share my fascination for these kinds of topics, I encourage you to read the article entitled The Great Disruption: How Machine Intelligence Will Transform the Role of Lawyers in the Delivery of Legal Services which Professors John McGinnis and Russ Pearce contributed to the Fordham Colloquium on The Legal Profession’s Monopoly on the Practice of Law. In my view, regardless of one’s field of expertise, everyone should read this article and begin to reflect on this phenomenon that will revolutionize the practice of law, and dramatically change all of our lives. Continue reading "Forewarned is Forearmed: Anticipating Big Changes for the Legal Profession"
