Hiring Teams,Firms, and Lawyers: Evidence of the Evolving Relationships in the Corporate Legal Market

How are relationships between corporate clients and law firms evolving? Drawing on interview and survey data from 166 chief legal officers of S&P 500 companies from 2006–2007, we find that—contrary to standard depictions of corporate client‐provider relationships—(1) large companies have relationships with ten to twenty preferred providers; (2) these relationships continue to be enduring; and (3) clients focus not only on law firm platforms and lead partners, but also on teams and departments within preferred providers, allocating work to these subunits at rival firms over time and following “star” lawyers, especially if they move as part of a team. The combination of long‐term relationships and subunit rivalry provides law firms with steady work flows and allows companies to keep cost pressure on firms while preserving relationship‐specific capital, quality assurance, and soft forms of legal capacity insurance. Our findings have implications for law firms, corporate departments, and law schools.     

The Organization of lawyers' Work: Size, Intensity, and Co-Practice of the Fields of Law

Using data from personal interviews with 777 Chicago lawyers, constituting a random cross section of the urban bar, the authors estimate the relative volumes of effort devoted to each of several fields of law, analyze the degree to which practitioners specialize in fields or groups of fields, and examine the patterns of co-practice of the fields. They find that the total effort of the Chicago bar is about evenly divided between work for corporate clients and work for individual clients. They also suggest that, while relatively few lawyers are highly specialized to a particular doctrinal area of the law, most are specialized to the service of the needs of a particular type of client. Exploring possible implications of their findings, the authors speculate that lawyers who are specialized to clients rather than to substantive fields may lack the incentive to devote their resources to the rationalization of legal doctrine.     

The Changing Structure of Opportunity: Recruitment and Careers in Large Law Firms

Growth and bureaucratization have begun to transform patterns of recruitment and career development in large law firms. Based on a case study of four large Chicago firms, this article examines these changes and their implications. The findings indicate that the social composition of large firms has become substantially more heterogeneous with respect to the status of law school attended, gender, and ethnoreligious background. However, data on lawyers' careers suggest that associates entering firms today face an increasingly bureaucratic organizational context marked by higher levels of turnover, earlier and more intensive specialization, decreased levels of client responsibility, and more frequent assignment to large-scale litigation. The article also addresses the dynamics of individual choice over type of work performed in firms. Lawyers initially working in litigation fields are far more likely to change fields of practice than are lawyers who begin in office practice fields, reflecting the increased tendency for firms to assign new associates to litigation as well as the alienating propensity of large-firm litigation for many associates. Paradoxically, a greater proportion of lawyers in traditionally organized, general service firms than in bureaucratically organized, specialty firms report that their choice of work was dictated by the firm. Also, somewhat surprisingly, the frequency with which firms explicitly direct lawyers into particular fields has not increased from earlier periods. The article concludes that these anomalies result from the fact that firms control the career choices of lawyers, and always have, but that the way such control is exercised varies across firms and historical periods.     

In Dependence: The Paradox of Professional Independence and Taking Seriously the Vulnerabilities of Lawyers in Large Corporate Law Firms

In this article, and drawing on the work of Martha Fineman and others, we deploy a vulnerability lens as an heuristic device to push against the concept of professional lawyer independence as enshrined in statute and promoted by legal services regulators. Using interviews with 53 senior partners and others from 20 large corporate law firms, we show how the meaning and practice of independence are profoundly mediated by the contexts, relationships, and interactions of corporate lawyers’ everyday working lives. Vulnerable to competition from other firms, the demands of clients, the shift over time from ‘trusted advisor’ to ‘service provider', regulatory requirements, pressures to make profit, and so on, these corporate lawyers appeared prone to developing and normalizing potentially risky and irresponsible practices. We therefore argue that a debate about corporate legal regulation is better based upon a richly theorized concept of interdependence that takes seriously the causes and effects of practitioner vulnerabilities in particular circumstances.     

The Practice of Law as an Obstacle to Justice: Chinese Lawyers at Work

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 journey: moving racial diversification forward from mere commitment to shared value in elite law firms

This article draws on institutional theory to analyze racial diversification in elite law firms in the United States, and to suggest ways of moving racial diversity forward beyond mere commitment to a shared value among firm members. Using published diversity reports, interviews, and American Lawyer Media demographic data spanning 13 years, this article argues that elite law firms are committed to maintaining racial diversity as a corporate identity – outward presentation to clients – because their clients have come to rely on this commitment. Conversely, racial diversity is not yet an organizational identity, or a shared value among elite law firm members. This article suggests that a commitment to racial diversity can become a shared value among law firm members through the work of diversity champions and by incorporating ‘intentional diversity.’     

Legal Elites and the Shaping of Corporate Law Practice in Brazil: A Historical Study

Brazil today has a legal market that allows for foreign lawyers and foreign firms, but existing regulations are restrictive. Foreign lawyers cannot practice domestic law or litigation, nor can Brazilian‐licensed lawyers working for foreign firms or partnering with foreign lawyers. This was not always the case, however. Until 1963, there was little regulation of the legal profession. Beginning in 1913, elite US lawyers traveled to Brazil, with some even becoming prominent domestic practitioners. They partnered with local elite lawyers (who maintained their domestic privileges) and served as key brokers for US businesses seeking market entry. Drawing on the elite theory literature, and on ethnographies, interview data, and over 1,000 pages of rare Portuguese and English archival sources, this study's thesis is that sophisticated US and Brazilian legal elites capitalized on the lack of regulation to advance their financial interests, and in the process transformed Brazil's corporate legal sector.     

The global restructuring of legal services work? A study of the internationalisation of Australian law firms

The research discussed in this paper examines the ways that an elite group of law firms in Australia are contributing to the globalisation of business and restructuring of legal services work. We examine the distinctive commercial orientation and institutional corporate connections of this group, focusing exclusively on the continuities, breaks and reconversions of the Australian legal profession. Our findings reveal an institutionalised reproduction of strategic practice favouring the elite group of players that generally complies with the political, economic and symbolic power currently wielded by US and UK firms. The data specifically on the recent phase of internationalisation of legal services show Australian lawyers to be of lower status when compared to elite US and European law firms. Using a Bourdieuian method of analysis we explore the extent to which these Australian lawyers' strategic accounts show the potentially coercive and mimetic influence of the economic and symbolic capitals of dominant groups. We apply Sklair's global system theory as a means of interpreting Australian law firms' collective strategic intent, which at the time of this research is to develop a global competitive presence in markets in the Asia Pacific region.     

The Confrontation between the Big Five and Big Law: Turf Battles and Ethical Debates as Contests for Professional Credibility

This article uses interviews and comparative professional histories to explore the stakes of the battle- pre-Enron and seen in reactions to the Enron crisis - between the organized bar and the multidisciplinary practices (MDPs) associated with the Big Five accounting firms and their law firms. The paper examines modes of professional practice - family, Continental corporate law, and the Cravath model – to describe the tensions and potential solutions to maintaining professional legitimacy without appearing too close to business or economic power. The paper then seeks to explain preliminarily why the MDP debate became so strong in the United States despite the fact that the actual threat to U.S. corporate lawyers appeared relatively small. It suggests that the interjection of the Big Five potentially threatened a relatively precarious professional legitimacy with different impacts for different sectors of the bar.     

Guardians at the Gate: The Backgrounds, Career Paths, and Professional Development of Private US Immigration Lawyers

This article presents findings from a qualitative study of seventy-one New York immigration lawyers who are engaged in private practice. It focuses on the lawyers' backgrounds, career paths, and early professional training and describes, inter alia, the unusual diversity of this bar, the lawyers' reasons for practicing immigration law, the ways in which they learn to practice law, and the strong sense of community within the private immigration bar. It uses the idea of communities of practice to help understand how lawyers learn from their colleagues and are influenced by them. The article identifies several factors that may contribute to the supportiveness of the bar and the strong sense of community within that practice specialty, notwithstanding its great diversity. It concludes by making some preliminary comparisons between immigration lawyers and lawyers in other practice specialties and by identifying some questions for future study.     

Maintaining professionalism: emotional labor among lawyers as client advisors

Dominant professional ideology dictates that lawyers behave professionally toward clients by using logical, rational reasoning and expression and by leaving emotion and personal feelings out of their work. However, this ideology overlooks the fact that lawyers who work in settings that feature high client contact often labor under very emotionally charged circumstances. As a result, lawyers must use emotional labor to cope with their own feelings while maintaining their professional display. Using qualitative data based on semi-structured interviews with twenty lawyers in the Midwestern United States, I show that the lawyers interviewed in this study cope with their own feelings by using emotional labor to suppress the spontaneous expression of personal feelings, while working to evoke a display of emotions that does not run afoul of traditional standards of legal professionalism. Their use of emotional labor to cope with their feelings came in four forms: expression of genuine emotion, deep acting, surface acting, and detachment. The findings suggest that despite wide scholarly discussion of alternative conceptions of professionalism, the need to expand these discussions among law students and practitioners is still pressing.     

Working for Corporate Actors: Social Change and Elite Attorneys in Chicago

Elite attorneys have been the objects of social scientific study and speculation for many years. This article contributes to that body of thought by reporting some of the results of a research project that studied 59 members of Chicago's corporate actor legal elite-the lawyers who serve the city's major business, social, civic, political, and cultural organizations.
The article briefly defines the elite studied and the design of the overall re-search project. It then focuses on the working situations of these lawyers and the professional roles they play for their respective corporate actors. A division of legal labor that is discovered to separate house counsel from law firm partners among the elite is analyzed in some depth.
Since the professional roles of these elite attorneys differ from those de-scribed by other social scientists earlier, the article concludes by offering a theory to explain this apparent social change. By tapping recent discussions of the coming of postliberal society, it suggests that corporate actors engineer this new division of legal labor for their attorneys in response to the complex new legal problems posed by institutional changes in the larger society.     

Origin Myths,Contracts, and the Hunt for Pari Passu

We use interviews with corporate lawyers and a data set of contracts to explore an elite area of legal practice: sovereign bond lending. Sovereign debt lawyers work at prestigious global law firms, yet the contracts they produce include some terms that defy explanation. Lawyers often account for the existence of these terms through origin myths. Focusing on one contract term, the pari passu clause, we explore two puzzling aspects of these myths. First, we demonstrate that the myths are inaccurate as to both the clause's origin and the role of lawyers in contract drafting. Second, the myths often are unflattering, inaccurately portraying lawyers as engaged in little more than rote copying. We probe this disjuncture between the myths and lawyers' actual practices and explore why contracts origin myths might hold such appeal for this elite segment of the bar.     

Professional Innovation: Corporate Lawyers and Private Lawmaking

Through an intensive examination of the development and diffusion of a new legal device—the shareholder rights' plan or poison pill—this article demonstrates the entrepreneurial, lawmaking role of corporate lawyers. This study case suggests that corporate lawyers may act as legal entrepreneurs, developing and promoting new legal devices and strategies on behalf of actual and potential clients. If affirmed by the courts, these devices or techniques are rapidly diffused thereby contributing to the creation of new legal knowledge. The creation and successful defense of the shareholder rights' plan led to both new caselaw and statute law. In this way, corporate practitioners contribute to the creation of new legal knowledge, suggesting a bottom-up approach to knowledge creation rather than the conventional top-down view. It is suggested that legal innovations like the shareholder rights' plan are more likely to be developed in newer firms than in established firms and in specialized firms than general service law firms.     

Cause Lawyers,Political Violence,and Professionalism in Conflict

This article examines how cause lawyers in conflicted and authoritarian societies balance their professional responsibilities as lawyers with their commitment to a political cause. It is drawn from extensive interviews with both lawyers and political activists in a range of societies. It focuses on the challenges for lawyers in managing relations with violent politically‐motivated clients and their movements. Using the notion of ‘legitimation work', it seeks to examine the complex, fluid, and contingent understandings of legal professionalism that is developed in such contexts, offering three overlapping ‘ideal types’ of cause lawyers in order to better understand the meaning of legal professionalism in such sites: (a) struggle lawyers (b) human rights activists and (c) a ‘pragmatic moral community'. The article concludes by re‐examining how law is imagined in the legitimation work of cause lawyers in such settings and how that work is remembered in the transition from violence.     

The Legal Profession as a Social Process: A Theory on Lawyers and Globalization

This article proposes a processual theory of the legal profession. In contrast to the structural, interactional, and collective action approaches, this processual theory conceptualizes the legal profession as a social process that changes over space and time. The social process of the legal profession includes four components: (1) diagnostic struggles over professional expertise; (2) boundary work over professional jurisdictions; (3) migration across geographical areas and status hierarchies; and (4) exchange between professions and the state. Building on the processual theory and using China as a primary example, the author proposes a research agenda for studying lawyers and globalization that seeks to shift the focus of research from the legal elite to ordinary law practitioners, from global law firms to local law firms, and from advanced economies to emerging economies.     

Multijurisdictional practice and the health lawyer: will your practice benefit from the new ABA model rules of professional conduct?

At the end of the twentieth century, bar scholars and regulators were reexamining two traditionally improper aspects of legal practice. The first was the multidisciplinary practice of law, which would permit lawyers to offer accounting and other professional services to their clients, and allow lawyers to share fees with non-lawyers. The second was the multijurisdictional practice of law, which would permit a lawyer licensed in one jurisdiction to practice law in other jurisdiction in which he was not admitted to the bar. Enron and other corporate scandals deflated the movement towards multidisciplinary practice, but the movement to allow multijurisdictional practice bore some limited, yet important, results. This Article argues that the American Bar Association's new Model Rules 5.5 and 8.5, which broaden the ability of healthcare lawyers to practice outside of the states in which they are admitted, are a suitable accommodation to today's mode of practice, while still preserving the states' ability to regulate lawyers and protect clients.     

Private Law Firms in the Public Interest: The Organizational and Institutional Determinants of Pro Bono Participation, 1994–2005

Despite longstanding concern that the commercialization of legal practice is antithetical to professionalism, corporate law firms have dramatically increased their pro bono participation over the past few decades. What explains this paradox? This article examines the organizational and institutional determinants of pro bono participation across an elite field of large law firms. I find that pro bono work is only partly rooted in internal organizational dynamics and that the institutional environment appears more important for explaining variation in pro bono participation. These findings indicate that large firms may be more drawn to pro bono work as a social process tied to professional status and legitimacy than to concrete, rational organizational goals. Moreover, these findings point to the importance of the interstitial space that these firms inhabit between the legal profession and corporate market as an especially important factor in facilitating, rather than dampening, pro bono participation.     

The professional responsibility of lawyers: emotional competence, multiculturalism and ethics

Traditional legal education and the Socratic method it utilises are by and large successful at training lawyers to think, reason and analyse. The cultivation of lawyers' intrapersonal and interpersonal skills, however, has been, at best, neglected by the profession. All lawyers, like all human beings, are emotional. Emotions affect who they are and how they practise law, whether or not they are conscious of them. As emotions cannot be removed from the practice of law, it is essential that lawyers learn to understand and manage their emotions, as well as learn to be attuned to their clients' emotional lives. Ignorance of concepts such as countertransference, denial and unconscious bias adversely impact the lawyer-client relationship. Lawyers who understand basic psychological principles and behaviours, who are aware of their own psychological makeup, understand their cultural perspective and recognise and credit their clients' differences, will enhance their effectiveness as counsellors. The client whose lawyer has these competencies will enjoy a therapeutically superior counselling or representational experience. The neglect of either the lawyer's or the client's emotional life threatens to sabotage the lawyer's ability, and thus professional responsibility, to render competent and impartial legal advice. Through drawing parallels to the training and practice in other counselling disciplines and relationships, this article argues that psychological-mindedness and multicultural competence are essential elements of ethically responsible legal representation.