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.     

Influence and Issues in the Legal Community: The Role of a Legal Elite

This article is the third and last in a series that has focused on the corporate actor elite of Chicago's legal community—those attorneys who practice law with and for the major business, social, civic, cultural, and charitable organizations in the city. In this paper, the focus is on the participation of the members of that elite in a series of issues that have arisen in both the legal community and the larger society in the recent past.
The article first examines the resources for collective decision making which the members of the corporate actor legal elite bring to the process of community issue resolution. It then examines in detail elite issue preferences and the patterns of elite participation in five professional and political issues. From this analysis an interesting "paradox of power" emerges: the elite is most successful on those issues in which it is least interested and active and least successful on those which most heavily attract its participation. The article concludes with a discussion of the reason for this paradox, basing its answer in larger sociological theories of the activation of different types of resources in different types of community conflict.     

The Ethics of Corporate Lawyers: A Sociological Approach

The American Bar Association is considering a revision of its Code of Professional Responsibility. One revision deals specifically with lawyers whose clients are organizations; it attempts to delineate the ethical responsibilities of such lawyers when they discover an employee or a member of one of their clients is engaged in wrongdoing on the organization's behalf. Because the proposal suggests that corporate counsel may be justified in public disclosure of the wrongdoing when the organization itself fails to rectify the problem, it has sparked much controversy in the profession and much speculation as to whether and when corporate counsel will "blow the whistle." The article offers a sociological perspective on the act of a corporate counsel's public disclosure of organizational wrongdoing. The act of disclosure is treated as a social behavior, the likelihood of which is increased or decreased by a number of factors including the attorney's awareness of the wrongdoing, the attorney's orientations to the larger profession, the structure of the professional practice setting within which the counsel is located, and the supports for disclosure offered by the legal profession through its formal organizations. These factors are described and then combined into a general predictive model of disclosure by corporate counsel. A concluding discussion of the general ramifications of the proposed revisions focuses on the social implications of the attorney-client privilege, in which the client is as unique an actor as is the large organization.     

Legal Mobilization within the Bureaucracy: Disability Rights and the Implementation of Antidiscrimination Law in Sweden

This article argues that the analysis of legal mobilization needs to give more attention to the state and its relationship with social movements in order to examine how the state either sustains social movements’ demands or is a field of contention for those demands. Focusing on how disability bureaucrats and activists mobilize antidiscrimination law in Sweden, this article shows that two main factors shape legal mobilization within the bureaucracy and alter the state's ability to become a legal mobilization actor: (1) the institutional relationships between social movement organizations and government agencies and (2) the profiles and careers of bureaucrats and activists. It concludes by suggesting several lines for further research on law and social movements in nonpluralist countries.     

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.     

Framework for Analysis of Legal Mobilization: A Decision-Making Model

The American legal system, structured in an entrepreneurial mode, relies upon the individual actor to personally evaluate the burdens and benefits of invoking the law on his or her own behalf Without discounting the contribution to our understanding of legal mobilization which has been made by the access-to-justice movement, the author argues that focusing on the poor and the distribution of legal services has limited our understanding of the legal system.
The article presents an alternative analytic framework for examination of citizen use of the law. The model of legal mobilization presented focuses on demands rather than needs, on citizens rather than lawyers or judges, on decision making rather than access, and on invoking the law rather than compliance with it. Drawing on the literature and available empirical evidence, the author attempts to analytically clarify the complex process of legal mobilization by organizing relevant variables into a decision-making model that focuses on the individual actor and the factors weighed in deciding whether and how to proceed in mobilizing the law.     

Progressive lawyers under siege: Moral panic during the McCarthy era

Our goal is to analyze the culture within the San Francisco law firm of Gladstein, Andersen and Leonard (circa 1945–1965). For this we utilize archival documents, FBI files, oral histories, and personal interviews. The law firm represented alleged subversives, including Harry Bridges the longtime president of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union. Thus, the law firm partners were stigmatized by the clients they represented and they all had lengthy FBI files. The partners all had working class backgrounds, one was an immigrant and two were Jewish. Clearly, religion and ethnicity were not litmus tests for participation in the firm, nor was educational pedigree. Gladstein and Leonard graduated from elite law schools while Andersen did his legal training at a night school. During the dark days of the Cold War various partners were threatened, shot and jailed for merely engaging in their legal practice. Ironically, as the FBI blacklisted alleged subversives, these attorneys had more clients to defend.     

Client Influence and the Contingency of Professionalism: The Work of Elite Corporate Lawyers in China

This study examines how the professional work of elite corporate lawyers is constructed by influence from different types of clients. The data presented include interviews with 24 lawyers from six elite corporate law firms in China and the author's participant-observation in one of the firms. For these elite Chinese corporate law firms, foreign corporations, state-owned enterprises, and private enterprises constitute their extremely diversified client types. Accordingly, lawyers' work becomes flexible and adaptive to accommodate the different demands of the clients. Meanwhile, client influence on lawyers' professional work is mediated by the division of labor within the corporate law firm: whereas partners have solid control over the process of diagnosis, inference, and treatment and thus enjoy a high degree of professional autonomy, associates are largely stripped of this cultural machinery in the workplace, and their work becomes vulnerable to client influence. As a result, client influence on professional work appears to decrease with a lawyer's seniority.     

The legal profession of China in a globalized world: innovations and new challenges

ABSTRACT

The legal profession is undergoing fundamental changes; and this is the case not just in established legal markets. Based on a state-of-the-art sketch, this paper identifies and analyzes the latest innovation initiatives and alternative business models in China’s legal profession. It finds that, propelled by market demands and benefiting from technological advancements, the provision of legal services has become highly versatile today, giving rise to various alternative service providers, especially the rapidly rising online legal service portals. Because they are technically not law firms, the exclusivity requirements on lawyer ownership and legal service provision are not applicable to them. In the meantime, the competition for large corporate clients and lucrative business transactions is fierce and will continue to be so, not only within the club of big Chinese corporate law firms, but also between Chinese law firms and international law firms globally. In this course, some leading big corporate law firms in China are observed to have creatively incorporated key corporate features in running their business and compensating their partners, effectively deviating from the partnership?+?pure legal services regulation. Such market realities question the necessity and effect of the regulatory restrictions on law firm legal form and ownership structure, and call for an agenda for related research in the future.     

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 limits and benefits of international mobility: an empirical examination of the biographies of Australian legal academics

ABSTRACT

Academics are becoming increasingly internationally mobile, and yet there is still limited research into the nature, outcomes and limits of academic mobility. This paper examines the biographies of over 700 academics employed within Australian law schools. It identifies legal academics who hold academics qualifications have been employed outside of Australia. Almost a quarter of legal academics in our sample hold a first degree outside of Australia, over a third hold a non-Australian post-graduate degree. While it could be expected that possessing international experience would broaden an academic’s cultural experiences, we also found that the internationally mobile academics have typically studied and worked previously within an elite international law school, and are now employed within an elite Australian law school. In addition, experiences of international mobility are not equally distributed, and male legal academics are significantly more likely to have international experience than female legal academics.     

Agricultural pesticide abuse in Texas: A case study in the mobilization of law

This article focuses on why and how law was mobilized to regulate agricultural pesticide abuse in Texas during the 1980s. Pesticide abuse is defined as a significant, violent corporate crime worthy of additional analysis. The dynamic forces leading to development of reactive and proactive mobilization efforts are examined. Black’s propositions that proactive law becomes the major form of mobilization in regard to generalized social needs, in conflict situations, and in protection of society’s lower strata are confirmed. Restraints and limits on legal mobilization are discussed.     

Comparative Sociology of Law: Legal Fields, Legal Scholarships, and Social Sciences in Europe and the United States

This article attempts to gain a better understanding of the sociology(ies) of law in a comparative perspective through a structural and comparative explanation of the American and the French legal fields. It is argued that comparative sociology of law will not be able to explain the difference among countries, scholars, movements, and schools of thought in short, it will not be able to compare—as long as it avoids the analysis of some social and cultural presuppositions related to the context in which these differences take place. It focuses mainly on two of these presuppositions. First, legal fields, with their history, their internal structure, and their power relations, and second the type of relation between the legal field and the state. The empirical examination provided in this article explicitly seeks to offer insights for the reconstruction of Bourdieu's structural theory of the legal field.     

Law Professors: A Profile of the Teaching Branch of the legal Profession

In the United States, law schools provide the principal route of entry into the legal profession. Indeed, education in a law school is the only experience that virtually all members of the modern legal profession have in common. The gatekeeping function of law schools places the nation's law teachers in a most influential position. Although law professors play a vital role in selecting and molding the members of the profession, little research has been done on them. This article presents the results of the American Bar Foundation's first major study of law teachers. The author finds them to be a most highly credentialed group of lawyers, the overwhelming majority of whom are graduates of a small group of elite law schools. She also finds that possession of a degree from one of these schools appears to be not only highly determinative of who become law teachers but also of the nature of teachers' academic careers.     

A Forked River Runs Through Law School: Toward Understanding Race, Gender, Age, and Related Gaps in Law School Performance and Bar Passage

Analyses of the National Longitudinal Bar Passage Study (N = 27,478), demonstrate that law schools enlarge entering academic differences across race, age, disability, and socioeconomic origins rather than reduce them, and that academic differences in turn impact bar passage. Such differences cannot be reduced to (1) academic preparation, effort, or distractions; (2) instructional or law school-type characteristics; (3) social class; or (4) acceptance of an elitist legal ethos. Rather, results suggest that (1) women, minorities, and other atypical law students confront stigmatization throughout legal education;(2) for women (entering law school in 1991), this stigmatization is new, rejected, and consequently unassociated with law school outcomes; (3) for minorities, this stigmatization is continuous with prior socialization, making resistance difficult and consequent impact sizable; and (4) for other atypical law students, this stigmatization varies with visibility of difference, as do resistance and impact. Implications for social stigma theory and legal education are discussed.     

试论“超越法律”的企业社会责任

"超越法律"的企业社会责任,是企业负担的那些超出法律强制性义务规定且符合社会价值和期望的责任,确认这种责任的法律规范实为"软法",它主要通过责任目标内化于企业的商业行为和治理结构之中,以实现企业的"自我管制";通过保护利益相关者的实质性和程序性权利,提高利益相关者的谈判抗衡力量以实现市场的自发对抗;并以声誉机制和非政府组织的作用作为责任的实施机制的补充。     

美国法学教育和法律职业养成

美国法学教育是普通法传统下三年制研究生层次的职业教育。美国法学院力求教会学生学会在广泛学科领域中进行法律分析、掌握法律技能和理解职业价值。美国法学教育也遭到了各种各样的批评,有人批评法学院是否有效地为学生从事法律职业提供了充分准备。本文对美国法学教育作了概括介绍,分析了美国法学教育面临的挑战,并介绍了对当前的法学教育模式所提出的批评等内容。     

A Reasonable Balance of Law and Sentiment: Social Order in Democratic Taiwan from the Policeman's Point of View

Taiwan's political democratization has engendered a contradiction in its legal regime: consolidation of rule of law at the macro-institutional level is matched by the persistent marginalization of legal authority in ground-level social practices. This article uses an ethnographic study of neighborhood police to explore certain practical and structural elements involved in maintaining this contradictory sociopolitical order. I examine some of the processes through which state authority is invoked and applied to the policing of public space, focusing on the ideals of legitimacy that animate these processes. The argument of the article is that historical and cultural factors embodied in contemporary Taiwan's "idea of police"—exemplified in the trope of a balance between reason, law, and sentiment—are crucial to understanding how solidification of the rule of law within state institutions is kept within the boundaries of a social sensibility that does not take law as the last word.     

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.