Category Archives: Legal Profession
Jul 8, 2013 Andrew BoonLegal Profession
In the 1970s and 80s, a significant debate emerged around the role played by lawyers. Based on the American Bar Association model code, associated documents and case-law, several moral philosophers, and a few lawyers, characterised legal representation as comprising two overarching principles. The principle of neutrality, they said, demanded that lawyers represent clients or causes they may disagree with morally. The principle of partisanship demanded that they fulfil their client’s wishes to the limits of the law. Provided they fulfil these tasks faithfully, they were morally absolved on the grounds that the role they perform is itself good. This constituted a third principle: non-accountability.
Numerous critics of this ‘standard conception’ of the lawyer’s role found it morally indefensible. Despite some spirited justifications and more nuanced rejoinders, the balance of debate moved on to the consequences of such a conclusion and the steps that should follow. At one end of the spectrum lay measures such as encouraging lawyers to select clients on moral grounds. The middle ground was occupied by proposals that lawyers have discretion to ignore ethical norms producing immoral outcomes. More radical solutions involved abandoning the adversarial system or the de-professionalization of lawyers. Wendel is one of many scholars who, often in book form, have recently revisited the issue of the standard conception of the lawyer’s role. Continue reading "Re-Conceiving The Lawyer’s Role And The Foundations of Legal Professional Ethics"
Jun 5, 2013 Laurel TerryLegal Profession
If you are like me, you have started to notice—more and more frequently—expressions such as “creative destruction,” “creative disruption,” “disruptive innovation,” and “positive disruption.” Two recent examples include the TEDxCHANGE 2013 event held in April in Seattle which had the theme of Positive Disruption and a January 2013 Harvard Business Review blog entry entitled Creative Destruction Visits the Legal Profession. These terms have also appeared in conferences (see Panel 1) and talks at places such as Georgetown and Harvard law schools and in blog posts by higher education leaders, legal academics such as Bruce Kobayashi, and legal consultants such as Jordan Furlong (see here and here [legal education] and here, here, and here [legal services]). Disruptive innovation has been a prominent theme in the award-winning LawWithoutWalls program, which was founded by Michele DeStefano and Michael Bossone from University of Miami School of Law and in the ReInvent Law Laboratory, which is a creation of Michigan State Professors Dan Katz and Renee Knake.
During the past five years, as I have noticed more and more people using expressions such as “creative destruction,” I wondered what class or book I had missed since the speakers all seemed to know much more about this topic than I did. For this reason, I was particularly pleased to read Professor Ray Campbell’s new article entitled Rethinking Regulation and Innovation in The U.S. Legal Services Market because it provided the historical and theoretical background behind these expressions and because it gave me a new way to think about changes taking place in the legal services and legal education markets. Continue reading "“Creative Destruction” and the Legal Services & Legal Education Markets"
Apr 29, 2013 Elizabeth ChamblissLegal Profession
Renee Newman Knake, Democratizing Legal Education, 45 Conn. L. Rev. (forthcoming, May 2013), available at SSRN.
What are the public duties of law schools? Specifically, what duty, if any, do law schools have to educate people outside of the profession, such as clients, would-be clients, and ordinary citizens and consumers? Do law schools have a duty to promote public access to legal information and services?
Most of the recent call for U.S. legal education reform has focused on the interests of lawyers and problems of access to the profession, such as rising law school tuition, the contraction of the legal job market, and law schools’ duty to provide prospective lawyers with accurate job market data. Such concerns about “the economics of legal education” for lawyers are the subject of a recent letter from a coalition of legal academics to the ABA Task Force on the Future of Legal Education. Continue reading "Law for All? The First Thing We Do, Let’s Educate the Non-Lawyers"
Feb 15, 2013 Susan FortneyLegal Profession
A fundamental tenet of lawyer regulation is that professionals should keep their own houses clean. The enactment of the Legal Services Act of 2007 (LSA) in the United Kingdom (UK) marked a significant shift in the approach to regulation of lawyer conduct. In addition to creating a new mechanism for handling consumer complaints, the LSA adopted a new regulatory regime that represented a radical departure from the traditional approach in which regulators prosecute complaints based on alleged rule violations. With the adoption of the LSA, lawyer regulation shifted to outcomes-focused regulation (OFR). OFR focuses on high level principles and outcomes that drive the provision of legal services. OFR requires an articulation of indicators to determine whether outcomes have been achieved.
In an effort to evaluate the new regulatory regime and how its effectiveness is being monitored, the Legal Services Board (LSB) in the UK conducted a comprehensive study of the legal services industry and regulation in England and Wales. The results of that study are set forth in a recent publication, Market Impacts of the Legal Services Act of 2007—Baseline Report (Final) 2012, (“Baseline Report”). Continue reading "Assessing How Lawyers Keep Their Own Houses Clean: Baseline Report on Outcomes-Focused Regulation"
Nov 27, 2012 Amy SalyzynLegal Profession
A bad news lawyer story is nothing new. As Deborah Rhode keenly observed over ten years ago: if one listens to the critics, it is easy to get the impression that “lawyers belong to a profession permanently in decline.” Current Canadian headlines only affirm Rhode’s observation. On a near-daily basis, we are gloomily advised of a spate of lawyerly crises. Ongoing problems with access to justice, lawyer incivility, lack of diversity and, most recently, shortages in articling (mandatory apprenticeship) positions, all loom large. Reading the newspaper can be demoralizing to newcomers and seasoned practitioners alike.
The recently published collection of essays in Why Good Lawyers Matter provides a timely counterweight to some of this doom and gloom. To be sure, there are real, pressing problems facing the Canadian legal profession. Thankfully, Why Good Lawyers Matter does not ignore this reality. Rather than “offer an apology” for the legal profession, the central idea behind Why Good Lawyers Matter is “to provide a well-informed and accessible reflection on what lawyers should do and why.” The result is a colorful array of thoughtful ruminations on the topic of lawyering. Continue reading "Good Lawyers, Gone Good?"
Oct 30, 2012 Richard MoorheadLegal Profession
Chris Hanretty,
Political Preferment in English Judicial Appointments, 1880-2005 (2012), APSA 2012 Annual Meeting Paper,
available at SSRN.
We Brits like to point to our judiciary as emblematic of the superiority of our common law system. Meritocratic neutrality is one of the signal claims made by both the judiciary and the Bar. A lot of academic ink has been spilt deconstructing that particular claim, but it was nevertheless a delight to stumble across Chris Hanretty’s paper Political Preferment in English Judicial Appointments, 1880–2005. It’s a delight for a number of reasons. Firstly, Dr. Hanretty is a political scientist, and political scientists are mysteriously rare students of UK legal systems, even in the UK. Secondly, it’s based on a sophisticated quantitative analysis. Thirdly, it is well written: a delicious yet concise historical analysis of judicial appointment to the Court of Appeal. Fourthly, there’s even a bit of polite methodological argy-bargy (at p.12) for the quants guys (and it nearly always is guys) who love that stuff. But finally, it evidences several important points about the significance of politics, elites and judges.
The study looks at the promotion of judges, largely from the High Court bench (which is the first instance court of highest status) to the Court of Appeal and to what was then the House of Lords (now the Supreme Court). It tests a number of hypotheses about this promotion process to discover whether promotion appears to be related to social standing; education; early appointment as a “rising star”; whether the judge is, for instance, a family (low status) or commercial (high status) judge; overt party political affiliation (historically significant in most narratives); and whether “candidates who were previously appointed [to their initial judicial office] by the governing party are more likely to be promoted.” Continue reading "A Quantitative History of Judicial Elites"
Oct 2, 2012 Sida LiuJotwellLegal Profession
Bernard A. Burk & David McGowan,
Big But Brittle: Economic Perspectives on the Future of the Law Firm in the New Economy, 2011
COLUM. BUS. L. REV. 1 (2011)
available at SSRN.
Until the recent global financial crisis, elite law firms had been growing in size and number of offices for decades, both in the United States and across the world. Accordingly, the reasons behind law firm growth have fascinated legal scholars as well as social scientists studying the legal profession. Many theories have been formulated and tested by empirical research. Burk and McGowan’s article not only provides an excellent summary of these competing theories, but also proposes two new perspectives, namely, (1) relational capital and internal referral network; and, (2) technological innovation and transaction cost. Both are familiar theories in other research areas but neither had been applied to explain the growth of law firms.
In this essay, Burk and McGowan examine the evolution of large law firms in America from the late nineteenth century to the 2008 economic recession. Until the 1960s, most elite law firms have had a simple “partner-associate” two-tier structure following the Cravath System, which emphasized the long-term training of associates, the “up or out” rule of promotion, and the lockstep system for partners. Lateral hiring of partners were rare. As a result, firm growth was steady, featuring what Galanter and Palay have called law firms’ “internal growth engine.” From the 1970s to the mid-2000s, however, law firm growth entered an “explosive” era – the growth rate of elite firms jumped from 5% per year to 8% or more (p. 11). By the mid-1980s, the number of American law firms with more than a hundred lawyers had increased from a dozen to more than 250. The growth in size was accompanied by the expansion of geographic locations and lateral mobility. By 1988, over a quarter of the 500 largest American law firms had acquired more than half of their partners laterally. The lateral movement of associates had also become more frequent. As a result, the Cravath System was significantly eroded. Meanwhile, the formal structure of large law firms had become more complex – two-tier partnership was more commonly adopted, with an increasing proportion of non-equity partners and a higher leverage (i.e., associate-partner ratio) in most firms. Continue reading "Big and Innovative? The Future of Law Firms (Not Only the American Ones)"
Sep 5, 2012 Carole SilverJotwellLegal Profession
The importance of India as a site for activity and study with regard to the legal profession and globalization is underscored by the attention it currently generates in the legal and popular press But it also is an area characterized by uncertainty. In fact, even as I write, there has been an additional development regarding the practice of law by foreign law firms: the Indian Supreme Court issued an interim order on July 4, 2012 that reinforced the uncertainty surrounding the authority for and confidence of global law firms to serve clients with interests in and related to India. In light of this, I was delighted to learn that the subject had been taken on by Mihaela Papa and David Wilkins, both of Harvard Law School’s Program on the Legal Profession. Their new article, “Globalization, Lawyers, and India: Toward a Theoretical Synthesis of Globalization Studies and the Sociology of the Legal Profession,” promises to “draw[] together globalization literature with the scholarship on the sociology of the legal profession . . . [to] provide a new lens through which to analyze economic, political and social transformations occurring in the Indian legal profession.” (P.2) My interest in the article was piqued not only by the topic, but also because Wilkins, the highly-regarded Professor of Law and chair of Harvard’s Program on the Legal Profession, is spearheading its GLEE project (Globalization, Lawyers, and Emerging Economies), which “investigates the impact of globalization on the corporate legal sector in major emerging economies and the effect of changes in this sector on other parts of the legal order, including legal education and the provision of legal services to underrepresented populations.” This paper is an early product of GLEE and, as such, reveals promises of the larger study.
The article does not disappoint and offers a thoughtful addition to the growing body of work on globalization and the legal profession. Papa and Wilkins begin by framing their investigation of India’s legal profession within the literature on globalization, and identify three “social processes commonly identified by globalization scholars in other areas [as] help[ful] to explain the changes currently taking place in the Indian legal profession: economic globalization, globalization of knowledge, and globalization of governance.” (P.3) In doing this, they offer a terminology for analysis that reveals the importance both of differentiating and connecting these three core processes. Continue reading "Negotiating Globalization’s Influence: The Indian Perspective"
Jul 5, 2012 Eli WaldJotwellLegal Profession
Everyday Injustice is an empirical study of Latino and Latina attorneys. The book examines the lawyers’ cultural, socioeconomic and family backgrounds: it compares and contrasts their law school experiences, socialization into the profession, career paths and ideological and professional commitments with that of their non-Latino peers; it explores the intersection of racial, class, gender and professional identities; and it documents the political leanings, activities and political values of Latino and Latina attorneys. Everyday Justice investigates shared perceptions and experiences of negative stereotyping encountered by Latino and Latina attorneys as well as their sense of marginalization and professional isolation. It is a rich and revealing account of the professional lives of minority lawyers striving to overcome discrimination in a profession purporting to adhere to the highest standards of equality.
The book represents an important addition to the scholarship of the legal profession. As the profession continues to struggle, notwithstanding its increased diversity, with persistent under-representation of women and minority lawyers within its elite ranks, growing scholarly attention has been given to the experiences of gender, racial and class minorities. To date, however, insufficient attention has been paid to the experiences of the fastest growing ethnic minority group in the United States, Latinos and Latinas. Moreover, following recent US Supreme Court decisions that have eroded affirmative action policies, placed procedural limitations on Title VII litigation, and restricted avenues for recovery, some commentators have expressed concern that the Court’s emphasis on the impact of affirmative action on African-Americans and Caucasians, its focus on intentional past discrimination and its inattention to Latinos, and implicit discrimination might cause it to prematurely strike down affirmative action policies altogether. Exploring in great detail the professional lives of Latino lawyers, including their discriminatory experiences, Everyday Injustice is especially important and timely and provides a rich and detailed context against which the wisdom of affirmative action policies as well as other diversity measures may be evaluated on an informed basis. Continue reading "Mechanisms of Discrimination"
May 25, 2012 Heather FieldJotwellLegal Profession
Students are graduating from law school with unprecedented amounts of debt and are confronting an uncertain job market. Editorials in the New York Times condemn law schools for failing to teach lawyering. The 2007 Carnegie Report calls for law schools to increase skills and professionalism training so that law school graduates can be better prepared for practice. And the ABA is considering revisions to the law school accreditation standards that would increase the emphasis on what students learn, rather than on what we teach.
By now, we are all familiar with the many criticisms of legal education. Given this backdrop, I want to highlight a tax academic’s scholarship, not on tax law, but rather on the broader topic of legal education reform. Brad Borden, a prolific scholar in the field of partnership and real estate taxation, is the co-author (together with Robert Rhee) of The Law School Firm. The article suggests an alternate model for legal education that could better connect law schools with law practice. Continue reading "A Tax Scholar’s Take on Legal Education Reform"
