Abstract Each year more than 2 million Americans divorced, and most of them use a lawyer. In closed-door conversations between lawyers and their clients strategy is planned, tactics are devised, and the emotional climate of the divorce is established. Do lawyers contribute to the pain and emotional difficulty of divorce by escalating demands and encouraging unreasonable behavior? Do they take advantage of clients at a time of emotional difficulty? Can and should clients trust their lawyers to look out for their welfare and advance their long-term interests? Austin Sarat and William L.F. Felstiner’s new book, based on a pioneering and intensive study of actual conferences between divorce lawyers and their clients, provides an unprecedented behind-the-scenes description of the lawyer-client relationship, and calls into question much of the conventional wisdom about what divorce lawyers actually do. Divorce Lawyers and Their Clients suggests that most divorces are marked less by a pattern of aggressive advocacy than by one of inaction and drift. It uncovers reasons why lawyers find divorce practice frustrating and difficult and why clients frequently feel dissatisfied with their lawyers. This new work provides a unique perspective on the dynamics of professionalism. It charts the complex and shifting ways lawyers and clients “negotiate” their relationship as they work out the strategy and tactics of divorce. Sarat and Felstiner show how both lawyers and clients are able to draw on resources of power to set the agenda of their interaction, while neither one is fully in charge. Rather, power shifts between the two parties; where it is achieved, power is found in the ability to have one’s understandings of the social and legal worlds of divorce accepted. Power then works through the creation of shared meanings. Divorce Lawyers and Their Clients examines the effort to create such shared meanings about the nature of marriage and why marriages fail, the operation of the legal process, and the best way to bring divorces to closure. It will be fascinating reading for anyone who is going through, or has gone through a divorce, as well as for lawyers, judges, and scholars of law and society.
Reviewed by: Educating Lawyers: Preparation for the Profession of Law Hillary A. Sale Educating Lawyers: Preparation for the Profession of Law William M. Sullivan, Anne Colby, Judith Welch Wegner, Lloyd Bond, and Lee S. Shulman San Francisco: Jossey-Bass/Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, 2007, 240 pages, $40.00 (hardcover) Educating Lawyers, the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching's new book, explores legal education and urges significant change in both curriculum and "tone." The book is one of a series on professional education. The first was Educating Clergy, and the others will focus on educating engineers, nurses, and physicians. Educating Lawyers attempts to provide a view of legal education through the lenses of the other educational processes. In doing so, it provides helpful insights into how legal educators can improve what they do, but fails fully to appreciate what law schools and legal educators are in fact doing. The premise of this series is, in part, that professional education's value depends on linking it successfully to practitioners and the public that they serve. According to Educating Lawyers, law schools are not succeeding as well as they might. The study posits that lawyers operate under a social contract, in the public sphere and with the public trust. This social contract, like legal contracts more generally, contains reciprocal obligations. To comply with their contractual responsibilities, law schools must teach students in a way that allows graduates to succeed in meeting those obligations. Among the things the study blames are the Socratic, case-dialogue form of instruction, which it argues is at least over-emphasized if not over-used, and the lack of courses that provide "real-world" lawyering skills and interactions. The study offers suggestions for law schools to improve the quality of education so that the would-be lawyers can be responsible contract participants. The book's prescription is deceptively simple—develop skill-based opportunities and courses, find ways to emphasize and integrate skills and ethical instruction throughout the curriculum, and pay better attention to the research on learning and assessment. To determine whether the legal academy is succeeding in its professional mission, the study first explores the "signature pedagogy" of the legal academy, the Socratic, case-dialogue method, and the problems that over-reliance on it can create—gaps in moral and ethical training. Although critical of the Socratic, case-dialogue method, the study recognizes it is key to helping students learn to speak a common language. To some extent, law schools use this teaching method across the board, particularly in the first year. The result is a bit like foreign language immersion, and it is extremely effective in bringing students quickly into another world, teaching them to speak like lawyers and eventually, helping them to reason like lawyers. Missing, however, from the traditional law-school curriculum, the study concludes, are two key complements—experience with clients and ethical substance. The former is not necessarily connected to the teaching method, but the study concludes that the latter may be. That is, the study posits that students who wish to be facile reasoners in the classroom must separate their sense of justice and fairness from legal procedure and doctrine. Here, [End Page 71] however, the study goes too far. The purpose of legal procedure is to provide a baseline for justice and fairness. Indeed, laws are about moral baselines, societal consensus points, so to speak. Good Socratic law professors help students to understand this baseline and its gaps. Arguably, the answer to the study's concerns is increased transparency about what the method seeks to accomplish and how to invoke moral concerns effectively. Transparency would help students to understand and take responsibility for the choices they are making when they engage in the dialogue. The second key concern, connecting legal study to practice-oriented situations, however, is trickier to address. Not surprisingly, the study points out new lawyers most appreciate the aspects of their education that made their transition from school to practice easier. Legal education falls short when it fails to connect analytical reasoning skills to law practice. In part, this problem arises out of law schools' own attempts at academic legitimacy, such as a...
The legal profession has grown immensely in size, diversity, and influence but some lawyers clearly have more influence than others. What determines the systematic allocation of status, power and economic reward among lawyers? What kind of social structure organizes lawyers' roles in the bar and in the larger community? As John P. Heinz and Edward O. Laumann demonstrate, the legal profession is stratified primarily by the character of the clients served, not by the type of legal service rendered. Using data from extensive personal interviews with nearly 800 Chicago lawyers, the authors show that lawyers who serve one type of client seldom serve the other. Furthermore, lawyers' political, ethno-religious and social ties are very likely to correspond to those of their clients, and the distribution of prestige among lawyers reflects the dichotomy of client types. This volume raises questions about law and the nature of professionalism, questions addressed in the provocative and far-ranging final chapter. This work was originally published in 1983 and has been substantially revised to better serve students and laypersons alike. It offers a sophisticated and comprehensive analysis of lawyers' professional lives.
Cause Lawyers and Social Movements seeks to reorient scholarship on cause lawyers, inviting scholars to think about cause lawyering from the perspective of those political activists with whom cause lawyers work and whom they seek to serve. It demonstrates that while all cause lawyering cuts against the grain of conventional understandings of legal practice and professionalism, social movement lawyering poses distinctively thorny problems. The editors and authors of this volume explore the following questions: What do cause lawyers do for, and to, social movements? How, when, and why do social movements turn to and use lawyers and legal strategies? Does their use of lawyers and legal strategies advance or constrain the achievement of their goals? And, how do movements shape the lawyers who serve them and how do lawyers shape the movements?
The primary objective of this study was to examine work-related factors that were hypothesized to contribute to time- and strain-based work-to-nonwork conflict among married male and female lawyers. The findings show that work overload was the only common determinant for both forms of work-to-nonwork conflict for both male and female lawyers. Work context was important in understanding female lawyers' feelings of time- and strain-based conflict, where working in a law firm resulted in greater work-to-nonwork conflict. For male lawyers, working longer hours, working in a setting with more women and having a wife who held the breadwinner role contributed to their feelings of time-based conflict. Contrary to what was expected, the actual number of hours worked was not important in influencing married lawyers' feelings of work-to nonwork conflict. The results show that the domestic status variables were not important for female lawyers' feelings of time-based conflict and that additional family roles reduces their feelings of strain-based conflict. It was argued that female lawyers may successfully cope with their demanding careers because they can afford to pay for external sources of child care and domestic assistance, which should be investigated in future research. It was also suggested that working long hours does not automatically lead to work-to-nonwork conflict for lawyers because they typically exercise considerable control over the scheduling of their work time, which may allow them to deal with the potentially conflicting demands of their work and nonwork lives. Copyright © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
This paper focuses on earnings differentials in the for-profit and private nonprofit sectors, with specific reference to lawyers. An earnings equation for private lawyers is estimated and is used to predict what the nonprofit sector "public interest" lawyers could earn in the private sector. The finding is that the public interest lawyers are paid substantially less, that they know this, and that the financial sacrifice is permanent. Next, a job choice equation is estimated which suggests that those lawyers who choose public interest work have different "preferences" from those who choose private law practices. The difference may help to account for the willingness of the public interest lawyers to accept lower monetary rewards. Further research is needed to determine whether the differences found for lawyers in the two sectors are also found in other industries, and whether such differences are found only at the level of management or at lower levels. The goal is improved understanding of behavioral differences between for-profit and nonprofit firms.
This article helps strengthen our comparative and theoretical understanding of lawyers as gatekeepers to justice by analyzing the screening practices of lawyers in a non-Western context. The explanation for Chinese lawyers' aversion to representing workers with labor grievances focuses on their own working conditions, on the organization of their legal labor, and on their evaluations of the moral character of prospective clients. By linking the screening practices of Chinese lawyers to their socioeconomic insecurity and to popular stereotypes informing and legitimating their screening decisions, this article identifies institutional and cultural obstacles not only to the official justice system but also to cause lawyering. After establishing motives for screening clients, this article then demonstrates lawyers' screening methods: by defining legal reality in strategic and often misleading ways, lawyers use the law as a weapon against the interests of the individuals who seek their help.
The conventional model of the practice of law views lawyers as those who apply legal rules in the service of client interests, checked only by the constraints of the adversary system. A study of the impact of consumer protection laws on the practice of Wisconsin lawyers shows this to be an oversimplification. Lawyers for individuals tend to know little of the precise contours of consumer protection law. They most often serve as mediators between buyer and seller, relying on general norms of fairness and good faith. Lawyers for businesses are more likely to make use of the law, but they are seldom called on to deal with particular disputes. Lawyers' own values and interests are reflected in the way in which they represent clients. As a result, reform laws which create individual rights are likely to have only symbolic effect unless incentives are devised to make their vindication in the long-range interest of members of the bar. Moreover, an understanding of the many roles played by lawyers also requires a more expanded picture of practice. The picture of the lawyer as litigator in the adversary system may itself serve largely symbolic functions.
Over the past several decades, the number of lawyers in large cities has doubled, women have entered the bar at an unprecedented rate, and the scale of firms has greatly expanded. This immense growth has transformed the nature and social structure of the legal profession. In the most comprehensive analysis of the urban bar to date, Urban Lawyers presents a compelling portrait of how these changes continue to shape the field of law today. Drawing on extensive interviews with Chicago lawyers, the authors demonstrate how developments in the profession have affected virtually every aspect of the work and careers of urban lawyers - their relationships with clients, job tenure and satisfaction, income, social and political values, networks of professional connections, and patterns of participation in the broader community. Yet despite the dramatic changes, much remains the same. Stratification of income and power based on gender, race, and religious background, for instance, still maintains inequality within the bar. The authors of Urban Lawyers conclude that organizational priorities will likely determine the future direction of the legal profession. And with this landmark study as their guide, readers will be able to make their own informed predictions.
How do professional associations build their resources and establish authroity? What are the conditions under which professional expertise can be mobilized for political action? If professional organizations are endowed with a wealth of resources, do they use them responsibly or only for economic monopoly? What is the potential scope of professional action today? In this pathbreaking study of the legal profession, Terence Halliday raises and addresses these questions combining extensive data from the rich archives o the Chicago Bar Association, one of the nation's largest and wealthiest bar organizations, with data from a national survey of bar legislative and judicial action. Beyond Monopoly demonstrates that the primary commitment of lawyers to economic monopoly has long been complemented by civic professionalism as the legal profession takes on more responsibility in the American democratic system when state capabilities diminish. Through his examination of three types of state crises in the 1950s and 1960s the challenges to legitimacy in the legal system, the crisis of individual rights during McCarthyism and the civil rights eras, and the fiscal crises of various state governments Halliday shows that large bar associations can have extensive influence on any institution that is regulated by law. He argues that lawyers have the capability of turning social and political issues into technical legal matters in what he calls an idiom of legalism. Under technical guise, lawyers come to exercise moral authority. Halliday maintains that the American legal profession over the past century has gone from a formative stage, when controlling its market in the delivery of legal services was paramount, to an established phase in the past two decades, when it has committed extensive resources to the complex needs of the modern state. A de facto bargain has been struck: if the state leaves the profession's monopoly fairly intact, the profession can use its expert resources to help the state adapt to strain and crisis. It can do so not only in the legal system, where it has been championing autonomous law, but in other spheres as well from the economy to the private sphere of individual rights. Halliday confirms that the legal profession deploys its expertise not merely to attain professional dominance, to control a market, or to purvey an ideology, but to increase the viability of democratic institutions. Beyond Monopoly introduces a pioneering approach to a historical and comparative sociology of the professions that will be of vital interest not only to sociologists, but to political scientists and lawyers as well.
Lawyers at work-in diplomacy, in relations with the Church, in territorial government, in the formulation of policy, in administration, and in the political struggle provide the unifying theme in this analysis of the exercise of political power in Renaissance Florence. Professor Martines studies the actual techniques of government, the hidden legal and constitutional questions raised by everyday affairs, and the responses of individual lawyers to the pressures of politics. He shows precisely how Florentine lawyers, both republicans and oligarchs, viewed the state. An appendix lists and briefly characterizes the some 200 lawyers who practiced in Florence during the period 1380 to 1530. Originally published in 1968. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
The ideology of American lawyers has been a persistent source of discussion and debate. Two obstacles, however, have prevented this topic from being systematically studied: the sheer number of attorneys in the USA and the need for a methodology that makes comparing the ideology of specific individuals possible. In this article, we present a comprehensive mapping of lawyers' ideologies that has overcome these hurdles. We use a new dataset that links the largest database of political ideology with the largest database of lawyers' identities to complete the most extensive analysis of the political ideology of American lawyers ever conducted.
Abstract How do lawyers think about and make the important decisions that constitute the day-to-day practice of law? This book explores that question through an extensive empirical study of lawyers practicing divorce law in New England. The authors emphasize the importance of “collegial control” in shaping lawyers’ decisions and identify a variety of “communities of practice” that serve as key agents of that control. Offering a new understanding of the nature of lawyers’ work in divorce law as well as a new perspective on legal professionalism, this book is required reading for scholars, students, and practitioners.
Tournament of Lawyers traces in detail rise of one hundred of nation's top firms in order to diagnose health of business of American law. and Palay demonstrate that much of large firm's organizational success stems from its ability to blend talents of experienced partners with those of energetic junior lawyers driven by a powerful incentive-the race to win the promotion-to-partner tournament. This calmly reasoned study reveals, however, that very causes of spiraling growth of large law firm may lead to its undoing. Galanter and Palay pose questions and offer some answers which are certain to change way big firm practice is regarded. To describe their work as challenging is something of an understatement: they at times delight, stimulate, frustrate and even depress reader, but they never disappoint. Tournament of Lawyers is essential to understanding of business of big law firms.-Jean and Colin Fergus, New York Law Journal
How important are lawyers in the decision making of the U.S. Supreme Court? Although legal expertise has long been assumed to benefit certain litigants, the frequency with which lawyers appear before the Court has not been directly measured. In this article, I argue that, quite apart from the status of different litigants, lawyers can be viewed as repeat players who affect judicial outcomes. Using data from the U.S. Supreme Court Judicial Data Base with data from the United States Reports, I propose and test a theory in which the informational needs of the Court are better met by more credible litigators. Thus, for example, a more experienced lawyer significantly raises the probability of a party's success. The findings testify to the efficacy of experienced counsel, irrespective of the parties they represent.
This article uses the case of Chinese lawyers, their professional troubles, and their coping strategies to build on and develop the concept of political embeddedness. Data from a first‐of‐its‐kind 25‐city survey suggest that political embeddedness, defined broadly as bureaucratic, instrumental, or affective ties to the state and its actors, helps Chinese lawyers survive their everyday difficulties, such as routine administrative interference, official rent seeking, and police harassment and intimidation. The article draws the ironic conclusion that legal practice in China reveals at least as much about the enduring salience of socialist institutions as it does about incipient capitalist and “rule of law” institutions. Lawyers' dependence on state actors both inside and outside the judicial system preserves the value of political connections inside the very institutions that some sociologists have argued are responsible for obviating the need for such guanxi.
This paper documents the gender gap in performance among high-skilled professionals in the United States. On the basis of widely used performance measures in law firms, we find that male lawyers bill 10 percent more hours and bring in more than twice as much new client revenue as female lawyers. The differential impact across genders in the presence of young children and differences in aspirations to become a law firm partner account for a large share of the difference in performance. We show that accounting for performance has important consequences for gender gaps in lawyers’ earnings and subsequent promotion.
Abstract In this much anticipated sequel to the legal bestseller, The Future of Law, Susskind lays down a challenge to all lawyers to ask themselves, with their hands on their hearts, what elements of their current workload could be undertaken differently - more quickly, cheaply, efficiently, or to a higher quality - using alternative methods of working. The challenge for legal readers is to identify their distinctive skills and talents, the capabilities that they possess that cannot, crudely, be replaced by advanced systems or by less costly workers supported by technology or standard processes, or by lay people armed with online self-help tools. It is argued that the market is increasingly unlikely to tolerate expensive lawyers for tasks (guiding, advising, drafting, researching, problem-solving, and more) that can equally or better be discharged, directly or indirectly, by smart systems and processes. It follows, the book claims, that the jobs of many traditional lawyers will be substantially eroded and often eliminated. This is where the legal profession will be taken, it is argued, by two forces: by a market pull towards commoditisation and by pervasive development and uptake of information technology. At the same time, the book foresees new law jobs emerging which may be highly rewarding, even if very different from those of today.
The potential conflict of interest between lawyers and clients is well known.If a lawyer is paid for his time regardless of the outcome of the case, the lawyer may wish to bring the case even when it is not in the best interest of the client, may spend more hours working on the case than the client would want, and may reject a settlement when the client would be better off if it were accepted.Alternatively, if the lawyer is compensated according to the conventional contingent fee arrangement -under which he is paid a fraction of any trial award or settlement but bears all of the cost of litigation -the lawyer may have an insufficient incentive to bring the case, may spend too little time working on it if it is brought, and may encourage a settlement when the client would be better off going to trial.In this article we propose a method of compensating lawyers that overcomes the conflict of interest between the lawyer and the client.Our system is a variation of the conventional contingent fee system, but, in contrast to that system, we would have the lawyer bear only a fraction of the cost of litigation -the same fraction that the lawyer obtains of the award or settlement.We demonstrate that when the fraction of the cost that the lawyer bears equals the fraction of the award or settlement that he obtains, he will have an incentive to do exactly what a knowledgeable client would want him to do with respect to accepting the case, spending time on the case, and settling the case.Under our modified contingent fee system, a third party would compensate the lawyer for a certain fraction of his costs, in return for which the lawyer would pay that party an up-front fee.In this way, the client would not bear any costs, even if the case is lost, just as under the conventional contingent fee system. 1 We use the pronoun "he" to refer to the lawyer and "she" to refer to the client.2 While lawyers have a professional obligation to do what is best for their clients, and this obligation may dampen the self-interested behavior that we describe in this paragraph, it seems obvious that a lawyer's financial incentives will affect his decisionmaking to some, and possibly to a significant, extent.-2 -
The law, Holmes said, is no brooding omnipresence in the sky. If that is true, writes David Luban, it is because we encounter the legal system in the form of flesh-and-blood human beings: the police if we are unlucky, but for the (marginally) luckier majority, the lawyers. For practical purposes, the lawyers are the law. In this comprehensive study of legal ethics, Luban examines the conflict between common and the lawyer's morality under the adversary system and how this conflict becomes a social and political problem for a community.Using real examples and drawing extensively on case law, he develops a systematic philosophical treatment of the problem of role in legal practice. He then applies the argument to the problem of confidentiality, outlines an affordable system of legal services for the poor, and provides an in-depth philosophical treatment of ethical problems in public interest law.