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.
This book is a close study of lawyers who practise occupational safety and health law in the United States, using detailed interview and survey data to explore the roles that lawyers have as representatives of companies, unions, and OSHA (the Occupational Safety and Health Administration). Placed in the context of evolving understandings of regulatory politics as a problem of public-private interaction and negotiation, the book argues that lawyers adapt to multiple roles in what prove to be highly complex settings. The core chapters examine stages of the administrative process where various groups attempt to shape the immediate outcomes and the development of OSHA law. These stages include administrative rulemaking, post-rulemaking litigation of government standards, regulatory enforcement, and compliance counseling by lawyers.
This book provides an empirically grounded, in-depth investigation of the ethical dimensions to in-house practice and how legal risk is defined and managed by in-house lawyers and others. The growing significance and status of the role of General Counsel has been accompanied by growth in legal risk as a phenomenon of importance. In-house lawyers are regularly exhorted to be more commercial, proactive and strategic, to be business leaders and not (mere) lawyers, but they are increasingly exposed for their roles in organisational scandals. This book poses the question: how far does going beyond being a lawyer conflict with or entail being more ethical? It explores the role of in-housers by calling on three key pieces of empirical research: two tranches of interviews with senior in-house lawyers and senior compliance staff; and an unparalleled large survey of in-house lawyers. On the basis of this evidence, the authors explore how ideas about in-house roles shape professional logics; how far professional notions such as independence play a role in those logics; and the ways in which ethical infrastructure are managed or are absent from in-house practice. It concludes with a discussion of whether and how in-house lawyers and their regulators need to take professionalism and professional ethicality more seriously.
This collection of articles and essays by Herbert Kritzer draws on his extensive research related to lawyers and legal practice conducted over the last 35 years. That research has applied existing theoretical frameworks and developed innovative ways of thinking about how to understand what it is that lawyers do. The chapters reflect the wide range of both qualitative and quantitative research methods he has employed, and draw on his work on the Civil Litigation Research Project, a massive study funded by the U.S. Department of Justice under the Carter administration, and continues through subsequent studies of lawyer-client relationships in Canada, contingency fee legal practice, and insurance defense practice. This book is for scholars and practitioners interested in understanding the work of lawyers in day-to-day litigation-like settings—and those concerned about what the future might hold for the structure of the legal profession and the nature of legal practice. “Lawyers at Work is a masterful collection, by one of the leading and award winning empirical researchers on legal institutions and the legal profession today, on the ‘black box’ of law practice. Spanning decades of research, Professor Kritzer presents data and findings on how lawyers bill, develop relationships with clients and opponents, manage scientific expertise, negotiate, and conduct their everyday work in a wide variety of case types. He explores and exposes the differences in both theories and data about the legal profession from virtually every major study there is on what lawyers actually do. If anyone wants to know about the real practices of lawyers in the past and present, and with important projections about the future, this is a must read. We can speculate about what lawyers really do, but Kritzer has the actual ‘facts.’” — Carrie Menkel-Meadow, Chancellor’s Professor of Law and Political Science, University of California, Irvine, and A.B. Chettle Professor of Law, Dispute Resolution and Civil Procedure, Georgetown University Law Center “Through wide-ranging field research over 35 years Kritzer has done more than anyone to document the craft of lawyers at work. This extraordinary compilation finds the whole in a professional lifetime of research, cementing Kritzer’s reputation as pioneer and master of empirical legal research.” — Tom Baker, William Maul Measey Professor of Law and Health Sciences, University of Pennsylvania Law School “Bert Kritzer has long been recognized as one of the most astute scholarly commentators on the U.S. legal profession. This collection of papers allows readers to see his body of work as a whole, and to appreciate the unique combination of quantitative and qualitative skills on which it rests. It is essential reading for anyone who wants to cut through the myths that pervade debates about policy and practice in civil justice.” — Robert Dingwall, Nottingham Trent University, UK
Canada's Supreme Court decides cases with far-reaching effects on Canadian politics and public policies. When the Supreme Court sets cases on its agenda, it exercises nearly unrestrained discretion and considerable public authority. But how does the Court choose these cases in the first place? From the several hundred requests for judicial review filed every year, how and why do the justices pick some cases but not others for review? Tournament of Appeals investigates the leave to appeal process in Canada and explores how and why certain cases "win" a place on the Court's agenda and others do not. Taking the approach that the process mimics a sports tournament, this study raises several vital questions. For example, is there an elite Supreme Court "bar" that routinely wins the tournament? Do the Court's rules affect the tournament's outcomes? Or does winning and losing reflect the resources of the parties? As players in this tournament, how do the judges play the game and how does it affect their votes to grant or deny judicial review? Drawing from systematically collected information on the process, applications, and lawyers that has never before been used in studies of Canada's Supreme Court, Roy B. Flemming offers both a qualitatively- and quantitatively-based explanation of how Canada's justices grant judicial review. The first of its kind, this innovative study will draw the attention of lawyers, academics, and students in Canada as well as in the Commonwealth, and European countries whose high courts share many features of the appeals process in Canada.
'Reorganization and Resistance' analyses the ways in which the legal professions of nine countries (England,France, the Netherlands, Germany, Canada, the US, Mexico, Australia and Korea) and one continent (South America) have confronted the internal and external political, economic and social upheavals of the past twenty years. It documents how change and resistance are inextricably tied together in an oppositional tension where the greater weight shifts gradually from one to the other, even shifts backwards at times, but in the long view runs in the direction of change. The most obvious instance almost everywhere is the struggle of women in legal professions where improvement is undeniable even as resistance is varied and stiff. The book charts the way demographic shifts have changed the work of lawyers, the way that the revenue from law practice has been re-distributed, and the extent to which barriers based on race, class, religion and gender have shrunk or shifted. It describes how some professions have been forced by government or co-regulation with government to reorganize. It also documents how others have not kept pace with transformations in the economy and changes and challenges to legal education take center stage while demographic shifts and institutional reorganization are of much less importance.
This paper surveys the changes that took place in large corporate law firms during the last quarter of the 20th century. It argues that the most consequential change was the sheer increase in the size of the firms, and it explores several possible explanations for that growth. The paper also notes changes in demand for particular types of legal work and argues that service industries are likely to create more work for lawyers than in an economy based on agriculture or heavy industry. The changing nature of the relationships between corporate lawyers and their clients is explored, with emphasis on the growth in the power and prestige of corporate inside counsel, the greater competition among firms, and the broader geographic markets served by the firms. Changes in firm management associated with the increase in scale are described and analyzed. The paper concludes with observations and speculation concerning "multidisciplinary practice" (i.e., the move into the market for legal services, internationally, of large accounting firms, financial services firms, and consulting firms).
