Why Are There So Many Lawyers? Perspectives on a Turbulent Market

The venerable legal profession has emerged, over the past generation, as one of the nation's fastest growing occupations. In this paper, we suggest that this fact is not mere happenstance, but is part and parcel of other fundamental changes in the "legal services industry." We attempt to define and clarify these changes by presenting time series data on a number of these developments, including the growth of law as an economic sector, the increasing concentration of law firm activity, and income trends among lawyers. We then offer a simplified demand and supply analysis of the market for lawyers, concluding that several interrelated factors fostered the lawyer boom. In the paper's final sections, we speculate about the forces causing a spiraling demand for legal services and a growing inequality of incomes between the elite firms and sole practitioners.     

Networking in the Shadow of the Law: Informal Access to Legal Expertise through Personal Network Ties

Civil legal problems are common in everyday life, but the costs of obtaining legal representation create barriers to legal action and contribute to disparities in access to justice. Some individuals, however, may have informal access to legal assistance through personal network ties with lawyers, enhancing their responses to justiciable problems. In this study, we draw from theories of social capital and network formation to examine the distribution and mobilization of network‐based legal expertise. Using nationally representative survey data, we find that network‐based access to lawyers is widespread, and most people who have ties to lawyers expect to informally mobilize legal assistance when facing a problem. But people who are most likely to afford formal legal representation are also most likely to have informal access to lawyers. Thus, while informal access to lawyers may shape responses to legal problems, it may also exacerbate inequalities in experiences with civil justice events.     

"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.     

Deterioration or refinement? Impacts of an increasing number of lawyers on the lawyer discipline system in Japan

This paper discusses the impacts of an increasing number of lawyers (bengoshi) on the lawyer discipline system in Japan. Due to a relatively small number of lawyers up until the 1990s, few people, including citizens and lawyers themselves, cared about the misconduct of lawyers. However, there appears to be a recent change in this tendency. The sudden increase in the number of lawyers after the Justice System Reform in 2001 focused citizens’ awareness on quality in the practice of law. Some lawyers claim that the increase in the number of young lawyers has deteriorated the quality of legal services, thereby damaging public trust in lawyers. In this paper, I analyze lawyer discipline cases from 1988 to 2015 that are available to the public. The result shows that while the number of disciplinary cases actually has increased since 2004, it is not young lawyers but primarily experienced senior members who have contributed to the increase. In conclusion, I argue that an increase in lawyer discipline is a positive phenomenon for the Japanese bar in developing detailed ethical standards, thereby providing better legal services.     

DATA ANALYSIS OF PROFESSIONALIZATION OF LEGAL WORKERS IN CHINA

Since the reform and opening up, the legal profession in China has changed dramatically. In terms of both quantity and quality, the legal profession has stepped into a new phase. A tendency towards widespread litigation and more professionals.＂ judges, lawyers and law students, can be clearly evidenced. Along with the development of the legal profession, other types of legal workers including business arbitrators, grassroots paralegal service workers （grassroots paralegals）, and mediators have experienced great changes. To a certain extent, they have become more marginalized than before. The development of the legal profession is extremely unbalanced. Whether in terms of the number of lawyers or the income generated by lawyers, the inter-provincial gap in China is huge. The development of the legal profession also brings out the issue of judicial corruption. From the number of letters and visits related to lawsuits and the National People＇s Congress deputies ＇votes on the reports of the Supreme People＇s Court and the Supreme People＇s Procuratorate, the level of legal corruption can be noted. This＂ problem has become a crucial challenge to the reputation of the legal profession and the judicial creditability of the country. The same amount of attention should be paid to judicial corruption as to the quality of legal services.     

Comparative Sociology of Legal Professions: An Exploratory Essay

The author surveys and compares the legal professions of 15 nations, including both civil law and common law countries. The essay is organized around the ways that legal professionals control their markets—first by controlling "production of producers" or who and how many enter the profession (with formal education or apprenticeship requirements, examinations, access to entry-level positions). Legal professionals also control "production by producers"—both external competitors and lawyers themselves. This occurs, for example, through definition and defense of the professional monopoly, control of competition between licensed professionals, and creation of demand. The discussion takes place against the background of the legal profession's recent history—assessing changes in its composition (by race, age, gender), in lawyers' practice settings, in the categories of work they perform, and in the income and status associated with these categories and with the profession in general.     

The Number and Earnings of Lawyers: Some Recent Findings

The number of lawyers in a society may depend on the level of real income and on the scope of government regulation. Cross-national data and time-series data suggest that the growth in the number of lawyers in the United States during the past 50 years can be better explained by increases in real income than by increases in government regulation. Other tests also suggest that regulation is of lesser importance. The combined share of memberships in American Bar Association Sections more closely allied with government regulation has not increased over time. The share of billings by the legal service industry to firms is found to be relatively stable throughout the post-World War II period, suggesting that the scope of government regulation has not caused business firms to use the legal service industry more intensively over time than individuals have. An examination of the earnings of lawyers over time suggests that members of the legal profession experienced relative prosperity during the 1920s and early 1930s and during the 1960s and early 1970s. The length of these prosperous periods is traced to the slow adjustment in the number of places in law schools.     

The Social Movement Turn in Law

The rise of social movements in US legal scholarship is a current response to an age‐old problem in progressive legal thought: harnessing law for social change while maintaining a distinction between law and politics. This problem erupted in controversy around the civil rights–era concept of legal liberalism defined by activist courts and lawyers pursuing political reform through law. Contemporary legal scholars have responded by building on social science to develop a new concept—movement liberalism—that assigns leadership of transformative change to social movements to preserve conventional roles for courts and lawyers. Movement liberalism aims to achieve the lost promise of progressive reform, while avoiding critiques of legal activism that have divided scholars for a half‐century. Yet rather than resolving the law‐politics problem, movement liberalism reproduces long‐standing debates, carrying forward critical visions of law that it seeks to transcend.     

The Financial Rewards of Elite Status in the Legal Profession

This article focuses on the role of intergenerational status attainment for legal careers. By decomposing the earnings gap between elite and nonelite lawyers at two points in their careers, we find that inherited cultural capital produces an earnings advantage as soon as lawyers begin their careers and that this gap persists over time. We further find that the processes underlying this gap change as lawyers make their way through the profession. While in early careers, the elite advantage is due to stronger starting endowments, the advantage for junior lawyers results from a more complex process, which combines starting endowments, professional capital gained during the first years of practice, and the rate at which endowments are differentially rewarded in the profession. Elaborating on work that identifies the importance of maintaining and concentrating diverse forms of capital in the legal profession, we explain the process through which elite lawyers gain and retain their advantage over time.     

民国上海女律师的执业困境与自我成就

随着民国女律师的出现,中国女性参与法律职业的空白状态终于被打破,成为中国男女在法律职业上平等之起点。由于“赋权”式执业资格的实现方式,女律师执业权利实现后的经营面临着诸多的困境。初入职场的女律师备受时人瞩目,但旧有的律师评价体系仍用“女流之辈”这类标签,高傲地认为妇女与法律职业是相矛盾的。民国女律师在执业过程中要同时克服来自时代、自身以及同业男性律师的三重困境。面对既存的男性律师关系网带来的压力,她们没有甘心屈居“他者”的地位,而是调动一切资源开展业务,试图跻身民国律师中的佼佼者行列。     

Gendering the Legal Complex: Women in Sri Lanka's Legal Profession

Drawing upon feminist standpoint theory and interviews with pioneering women lawyers in Sri Lanka, I argue for a focus on women as a distinct category in ‘legal complex theory’. I consider the following questions in making this claim. What were the internal structures of the legal profession that the older generations of women lawyers encountered as they entered the profession and as they took up positions of leadership? In what ways, if at all, was the ‘culture(s)’ within the profession patriarchal? In what ways, if any, did the entry and advancement of women impact these internal structures of the profession and its culture(s)? And what can we learn from these experiences in predicting the future trajectory of the legal profession? The analytical expansion that I propose reveals gender-based dynamics within the legal complex, such as gender-stereotyped perceptions about women lawyers within the profession, the ‘feminization’ of the profession, and ‘gender segmentation’ within its different spheres.     

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.     

民初律师惩戒制度论析——以惩戒案例为中心

律师惩戒制度对维持律师队伍的道德水准和专业素质起着规范和监督作用.在本质上这一制度反映出律师行业的自治性和国家对这一行业监督、管理和控制的互动关系.民初北洋政府时期在律师惩戒领域实行的是两级两审制:由高等审判厅推事组成的律师惩戒会是初审机构,由大理院推事组成的复审查律师惩戒会是复审机构.这一时期的律师惩戒事宜几乎完全被司法机构所垄断,律师公会被排除在外.就制度渊源而论,北洋时期的律师惩戒制度是对大陆法系中日本制度的借鉴,而有别于德国的相关制度.     

Conceptualising legal culture and lawyering stress

Recent evidence of the prevalence of stress and mental health issues among Australian lawyers has led to calls for legal culture to be changed to promote a better work–life balance and wellbeing for practitioners. Yet three decades of empirical studies in North America have shown consistently high levels of job satisfaction among lawyers. This paper investigates the role of legal culture in sustaining the paradox of satisfied lawyers under working conditions that may be conducive to stress. Drawing on Bourdieu's theory of practice and the literature on work stress, the paper conceptualises the relationships between the demand of legal work, the culture of legal practice, and lawyering stress. It concludes with a discussion of the implications of this kind of analysis for reforming the legal profession. In spite of the difficulty of cultural change, the paper argues that as consciousness is raised and the field changes, alternative models of practice will need to emerge, so that lawyering stress may become a mechanism for change not reproduction.     

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.     

英美法对医疗过失的判定原则及对我国的启示

过失是医疗损害责任认定中最为重要的条件,如何确定过失是医疗纠纷和诉讼中最为关键的问题。我国在该问题上的研究及实践均存有欠缺之处,而英美国家在过失判定原则中,其注意义务标准的设定和认定具有一定的合理之处,对我国医疗过失理论研究和司法实践均有借鉴作用。     

Lawyers and Embedded Legal Activity in the Southern Civil Rights Movement

We introduce the concept of embedded legal activity to capture the ways in which lawyers and legal organizations can become intertwined in the ongoing activities of social movements. Embedded legal activity is characterized by diverse issues and venues and comprises legal activities that help support movement infrastructure, close coordination between movement lawyers and other activists, and responsiveness to constituent needs. Investigating a comprehensive data set on legal activity during the southern civil rights movement, we identify forms of legal activity beyond the typical focus of legal mobilization, including defense for movement participants charged with misdemeanors and other crimes, movement assistance on organization‐level legal matters, and general legal aid to movement constituents. These were by far the more common types of legal activity and emerged from the embeddedness of lawyers in a mass movement. We argue that embedded legal activity is likely where movements prioritize grassroots leadership and community organizing and face significant countermobilization, hostile legal and political opportunity structures, and substantial social and economic inequality.     

Young Lawyers and Work in the Public Interest

Much of the discussion of the bar's "public interest" effort has centered on the apparent unwillingness of lawyers, including young lawyers, to pursue public interest rather than traditional careers. To the extent that it is agreed that public interest work should be increased, the problem has been viewed as one of supply of lawyers rather than one of demand for their services. In this paper, just the opposite is argued; a variety of evidence is brought forth to suggest that the current public interest effort is limited mainly by the number of jobs available in that sector. In this light, various methods of increasing the funding of the public interest sector, and hence the number of jobs, are reviewed.     

面对中国的法学

本文通过对 2 0 0 3年所发生的孙志刚事件和刘涌案的反思 ,指出中国的法律人必须重新在中国的环境中理解法律 ,在中国社会变迁的时空中来理解中国的法律问题 ,要更多用中国人自己的眼光和视角 ,审视包括法律人自身的一切。     

Predicting future litigiousness

Using a national sample of adults with various legal experiences, the current study examines the impact of prior legal experiences, general attitudes about lawyers and the legal system, and status characteristics on individuals' perceived likelihood of hiring a lawyer for resolving various personal problems in the future. Persons who have been involved in prior legal disputes, who have more positive attitudes about lawyers, and who hold more favorable views about the effectiveness of law in resolving conflict report significantly higher chances of hiring an attorney. Individuals' assessments of their future litigiousness, however, are largely independent of their status characteristics (e.g., gender, income, education, age) and the quality of treatment in their prior legal disputes (e.g., ratings of procedural justice, level of satisfaction with case outcome, and how their lawyer handled the case). The paper concludes by discussing the implications of these findings for improving the quality of legal services and for the future use of law as a method of conflict resolution.