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.     

Agents of Change or Unchanging Agents? The Role of Lawyers within Russian Industrial Enterprises

The transition from state socialism toward market capitalism has led to an almost endless supply of new laws and legal institutions. Industrial enterprises need to adapt to this new institutional regime. In-house lawyers are well placed to be agents of change in facilitating this adjustment. Using survey data from 328 Russian enterprises, the article examines the role of company lawyers, asking whether they have fulfilled this potential. Legal expertise is not in short supply, but lawyers are marginalized within the enterprise. They focus on established, routine tasks, such as handling labor relations or drafting form contracts, rather than on shaping enterprise strategies in the newer areas created by the transition, such as corporate governance or securities law. The failure of in-house lawyers to emerge as agents of change in Russia reflects a continuation of their low status during the Soviet era and the lack of professional identity among these company lawyers.     

Professionalism as Bar Politics: The Making of the Model Rules of Professional Conduct

Based on extensive archival research, this article offers a political account of the six-year process in which the ABA developed its latest ethics code for lawyers, the Model Rules of Professional Conduct. The article casts doubt on the validity of several functionalist and critical theories about the provenance and significance of professional ethics codes generally and the ABA's codes in particular. It evaluates the Model Rules process as an instance of de facto law making by a private group. And it identifies a lawyer's "professionalism-in-fact"–a set of common themes in the way lawyers currently think about the field of legal ethics. At the same time, however, the article stresses the ethical pluralism and structural differentiation of today's legal profession and roots the ethical preoccupations of various types of lawyers in the circumstances of their particular practices.     

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 Ethical Health Lawyer: An Empirical Assessment of Moral Decision Making

Writing in 1999, legal ethics scholar Brad Wendel noted that "[v]ery little empirical work has been done on the moral decision making of lawyers." Indeed, since the mid-1990s, few empirical studies have attempted to explore how attorneys deliberate about ethical dilemmas they encounter in their practice. Moreover, while past research has explored some of the ethical issues confronting lawyers practicing in certain specific areas of practice, no published data exists probing the moral mind of health care lawyers. As signaled by the creation of a regular column "devoted to ethical issues arising in the practice of health law" in the Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics , the time to address the empirical gap in the professional ethics literature is now. Accordingly, this article presents data collected from 120 health care lawyers. Presenting this population with a number of hypothetical scenarios relating to how they would respond when confronting an ethical dilemma without an obvious solution or when facing a situation in which their personal values were in tension with their professional obligations, this article represents a first step toward better understanding how lawyers who practice in health care settings understand and resolve the moral discomfort they encounter in their professional lives.     

Hero or Villain? Cinematic Lawyers and the Delivery of Justice

This essay is concerned with two specific issues that have as their backdrop the heroic central figure, the trial lawyer. First it considers the role of screen lawyers in seeking to maintain public (in this sense the public is the community within the film) support for the due process of law. The issue is the link between the lawyer and the initiation of the formal legal process. Essentially it is the extent to which the lawyer defends the institution of law. The second part of the piece considers when screen lawyers are permitted to go outside the formal process of law to ensure that the right result is achieved. It examines instances of where lawyers have been prepared to go 'beyond law' to achieve justice. Such acts raise a number of questions concerning how such behaviour affects perception of the legitimacy of the law, professional ethics, and the relationship between law and justice     

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.     

"It's Darwinism – Survival of the Fittest:" How Markets and Reputations Shape the Ways in Which Plaintiffs' Lawyers Obtain Clients

The survival of a plaintiffs' lawyer's practice depends upon the generation of an ongoing flow of clients with injuries that the civil justice system will compensate adequately. If this requirement is not met, lawyers will leave this aspect of the legal market for more promising ones. If they do, legal services for injured people will be diminished as a result. In order to find out how this personal services legal market is defined and developed, we interviewed ninety‐five plaintiffs' lawyers in Texas. These lawyers use four major strategies to get clients: client referrals, lawyer referrals, direct marketing, and other referrals. What any particular lawyer does is shaped by the geographic market from which clients are drawn, and by the lawyer's reputation. Our findings provide fresh insights for the empirical literature on plaintiffs' lawyers, and they provide an empirical context for assessing the potential impact of changes in the civil justice system, like tort reform, on the ability of plaintiffs' lawyers to obtain clients.     

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.     

Professional Minimalism? The Ethical Consciousness of Commercial Lawyers

This article investigates empirically, through semi‐structured interviews, what shapes the professional ethical consciousness of commercial lawyers. It considers in‐house and private practice lawyers side by side, interrogating the view that in‐house ethics are different and inferior to private practice to suggest as much similarity as difference. In both constituencies, and in very similar ways, professional ethical concepts are challenged by the pragmatic logics of business. We examine how their ethical logics are shaped by these pragmatic logics, suggesting how both groups of practitioners could sometimes be vulnerable to breaching the boundary between tenable zeal for the client and unethical or unlawful conduct. Although they conceive of themselves as ethical, the extent to which practitioners are well equipped, inclined and positively encouraged to work ethically within their own rules is open to question. As a result, we argue professional ethics exert minimal, superficial influence over a more self‐interested, commercially‐driven pragmatism.     

Career Paths and Choices in a Highly Differentiated Profession: The Position of Newly Qualified Solicitors

Differences in the working lives of solicitors have become increasingly marked in recent years. Growing numbers of lawyers are employed in the public and corporate sectors and, with the increasing size and wealth of City of London commercial firms, there are significant differences between these firms and those 'high-street' firms that serve local communities. These differences impact on lawyers throughout training and beyond, both in terms of rites of passage into the profession and in conditions of employment. This research, the final stage in a longitudinal survey spanning the 1990s, combines quantitative and qualitative methods to explore the reactions of newly qualified solicitors to their work. Building on the project's previous surveys, which charted the nature of disadvantage suffered by many prospective entrants to the legal profession, the research finds a large measure of satisfaction regarding careers. It also identifies causes for concern, including increasing specialisation in legal education and the potential separation of the intrinsic and extrinsic rewards of professional practice.     

The Practice of Law With LGBT‐Parent Families

In this article, I examine how a history of legal conflict has produced a constantly evolving professional identity for lawyers representing lesbian/gay/bisexual/transgender (LGBT) clients on family matters. Drawing on in‐depth interviews with 21 lawyers, I describe variation across areas of specialization, advertising, clientele, and access to professional networks. In addition, I focus on how sociopolitical and legal context shapes professional identity and practice for these lawyers, demonstrating the importance of practice location for this group of lawyers. Although interviews were conducted prior to national marriage recognition, these findings provide insight into the future development of the LGBT family law profession post‐Obergefell.     

法治视野下的律师辩护权——兼评高法刑诉法解释（征求意见稿）第250条

律师的辩护权是律师群体的一项重要职业权利。尽管在中国没有被列为公民的基本权利，但在一系列国际法律文件中被明确为基本人权。在刑事诉讼结构中，控辩双方力量相对均衡才能有效保障法官作出客观公正的裁判。刑诉法司法解释（征求意见稿）第250条虽对律师辩护权进行了规范，但该条第2款的规定仍有四点不当之处，包括违背控辩双方法律地位平等的基本要求，不符合正义的基本要求，超越法律的规定，损害律师群体形象。     

Legal Aid,Social Workers,and the Redefinition of the Legal Profession in Chile, 1925–1960

This article examines the history of the Chilean Legal Aid Service (Servicio de Asistencia Judicial) from the 1920s until the 1960s. It argues that with the emergence of the “social question”—the concern for improving the lower classes' working and living conditions to promote the nation's modernization and prevent political radicalization—the Chilean legal profession committed to legal aid reform to escape a professional identity crisis. Legal aid allowed lawyers to claim they had a new “social function” advocating on behalf of the poor. However, within legal aid offices, lawyers interacted with female social workers who acted as gatekeepers, mediators, and translators between the lawyers and the poor. This gendered professional complementarity in legal aid offices helped lawyers to put limits on their new “social function”: it allowed them to maintain legal aid as a part‐time activity that did not challenge the structure of the legal system as a whole.     

Bushwhacking the Ethical High Road: Conflict of Interest in the Practice of Law and Real Life

A long‐standing scholarly tradition regards professions, in general, and ethics rules, in particular, as “projects” of market control. It is no surprise, critics charge, that in the latest assault on the monopoly of the American legal profession–waged by multidisciplinary professional service firms–lawyers are hiding behind their ethics rules to protect their turf. In this article, I report on an extensive empirical study of conflict of interest in private legal practice and look comparatively at other fiduciaries, among them, accountants, psychotherapists, physicians, journalists, and academics. I investigate the role of ethics rules that seek to insure fiduciary loyalty in structuring the delivery of services. How does social and institutional change, roiling the fiduciary world, threaten disinterestedness and loyalty and how, if at all, do fiduciaries respond? How is the regulation of conflict of interest accomplished? Where are the conflicts rules most likely to be honored or ignored? What incentive structures encourage compliance? What are the costs and unexpected consequences of compliance? What is foregone? And is it all worth it? In what might come as a surprise to many, I find that the legal profession takes conflict of interest more seriously than many of the rest of us. As the title implies, legal practitioners largely travel alone, bushwhacking through the underbrush snarling the ethical high road. As critical scholarship predicted, lawyers do enjoy a monopoly at the end of the road. But this monopoly is achieved, not by restraint of trade or some other artifice or stratagem of market control, but by lack of competition. It seems that no one else is trudging alongside the lawyers. Lawyers are not necessarily more ethical than the others; they just behave more ethically–at least with respect to conflict of interest. The question is why. And what difference does it make?     

Lawyers' ethics in Italy – an historical treatment with some comments on recent changes in approach

This article examines the code of ethics of Italian lawyers in a historical perspective. It takes account of the many books on lawyers' ‘etiquette’ published along the centuries, varied according the different roles of lawyers, solicitors, assistants in the administration of justice and client's interests protection. It focuses the attention of the reader on the statutory rules enacted in the corporative legal system, and then by rules of the Italian Bar Council, which are equated to normative rules, according to the jurisprudence of the Italian Constitutional Court and the Italian Supreme Court. The essential content of the code of ethics concerns general principles of behavior, the relationship among lawyers, the attitude of the lawyer toward their clients, the contacts with judges. Also problems of competition are investigated and the permanent conflict of the Italian Bar Council with the Competition Administrative Authority.     

The experience of civil partnership dissolution: not ‘just like divorce’

Between 2012 and 2014 I interviewed some of the earliest civil partners to dissolve their partnerships about their experience of dissolution. When I presented my findings, most family lawyers responded that dissolution was ‘pretty much like divorce’. And so it was, in many respects; but I thought that such comments missed an important difference. This article focuses on the legal understandings of gays and lesbians who have undergone dissolution of their civil partnerships, and on their experiences of it. This seemed to me significant for three reasons. First, the experiences of lesbians and gay men have historically been marginalised, pathologised or absent from legal accounts and the dominant legal consciousness. In this research they would be put centre-stage. Second, the institution of civil partnership – transient though it may turn out to be – deserves study as the point of entry into legal recognition and regulation of same-sex couples’ relationships in the UK. And, third, it is this precise history that makes it different from marriage, and dissolution different from divorce, whatever the similarities in legal treatment.     

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.     

Values ethics and legal ethics: the QLD and LETR Recommendations 6, 7, 10, and 11

The Legal Education and Training Review (LETR) Report recommended increased attention to ethics and values and to critical thinking. These aims could be achieved jointly through teaching ethical thinking: not as theory but as part of developing the capacity for ethical conduct. Such a pedagogy has the potential to become a qualifying law degree (QLD) signature pedagogy supporting “life-narratives” of students. The LETR Report recommends a review of the QLD emphasising legal values and ethics. Concern with values and ethics is linked to concern with professional conduct. Maintaining the law degree as a general or liberal qualification is also strongly desired. These potentially conflicting drivers generate ambivalence towards legal ethics as a subject for study, especially if legal ethics are perceived as teaching the professional codes.

Resolution of this tension is achievable through recognising the potential role of ethical teaching as part of an identity apprenticeship. Developing ethical character is as much a liberal as a professional aim. Ethics teaching can play an integrative role in the QLD. Formation of student identity is a central part of higher education taking colouration from being situated in legal education. In this context teaching legal ethics becomes the use of a salient example for carrying out the broader project of developing ethical capacity.