Comment on "Aligning the Interests of Lawyers and Clients"

Polinsky and Rubinfeld (2003) propose a novel system for eliminatingthe conflict of interest between lawyers and clients over howhard the lawyer should work on a given case. In their analysisof the system, however, Polinsky and Rubinfeld implicitly assumethat the lawyer's marginal cost of effort is common knowledge.This comment shows that, when this assumption is relaxed, thoughtheir scheme does reduce the agency problem relative to thestandard contingency fee arrangement, it no longer eliminatesit.     

Lawyers Seeking Clients, Clients Seeking Lawyers: Sources of Contingency Fee Cases And Their Implications for Case Handling

Where do the clients of contingency fee lawyers come from, and what are the implications of client sources for contingency fee practice? Those are the questions this paper considers, drawing upon multiple sources of data. The analysis shows that relatively few clients come to lawyers’ offices in response to advertising. Rather, it is the more traditional route of reputationally based referrals that bring in the vast majority of contingency fee clients. The importance of maintaining a reputation that will draw in future clients tends to curb the potential for abuses created by the inherent conflict of interest between lawyer and client that the contingency fee creates.     

论律师会见权

2007年10月28日,《律师法(修订草案)》经过全国人大常委会三次审议,终于获得通过。新《律师法》相对现行《律师法》强化了辩护律师执业权利,对于改善律师执业环境,发挥律师的职能进一步提供了法律保障。为充分利用新《律师法》所带来的机遇,推动律师“会见难”局面改善,笔者在研究中外法律规定和分析司法实践中阻碍律师会见因素的基础上,设想了律师会见权具体实现程序,以期达到保障人权与惩治犯罪兼顾、遵守国际准则与尊重我国具体国情相结合的目标。一、律师会见权及其与阅卷权、调查取证权的差别(一)律师会见权的概念及其作用律师会见权是…     

Public Lawyers and Private Clients: An Empirical Observation on the Relative Success Rates of Cause Lawyers

Cause lawyering is often criticized for creating an untenable tension between the professional obligations of the lawyer to the individual client and the lawyer's ideological commitment to public causes. I sought to test empirically the validity of this argument by comparing the relative success rates of political lawyers and non‐political lawyers in defending their clients' interests in litigation concerning house‐demolition orders before the Israeli High Court of Justice. I found that the general success rates of political lawyers in the research population were significantly higher than those of non‐political lawyers. These findings can serve as an additional support for the various arguments in favor of cause lawyering.     

Lawyers for Conservative Causes: Clients, Ideology, and Social Distance

Scholars have devoted attention to "cause lawyers" on the political left, but lawyers who work on the conservative side of the American political spectrum have received relatively little academic consideration. This article presents systematic data on the characteristics of and relationships among lawyers affiliated with organizations active on a selected set of 17 conservative issues. We find that the lawyers serve several separate and distinct constituencies—business conservatives, Christian conservatives, libertarians, abortion opponents—and that the credentials of the lawyers serving these varying constituencies differ significantly. The greatest degree of social separation occurs between the business constituency and the abortion opponents, with another clear separation between libertarians and the interest groups devoted to traditional family values and order maintenance. The divisions among these constituencies appear to reflect the difference between "insider politics" and "populism," which is manifested in part in actual geographic separation between lawyers located in the District of Columbia and those in the South, West, and Midwest. In the center of the network, however, we find some potential "mediators"—prominent lawyers who may facilitate communication and coordination among the several constituencies. These lawyers and the organizations they serve attempt to merge morality, market freedom, and individual liberty concerns, and they convene meetings of diverse sets of lawyers and organizational leaders to seek consensus on policy goals. Nonetheless, the findings indicate that most organizations are seldom active on issues that lie beyond the relatively narrow boundaries of their own interests.     

律师在侦查阶段的维权作用--人权约法与我国法律的视角

侦查阶段是刑事司法程序中权利最容易受到侵害的诉讼阶段.因此,国际人权约法对侦查阶段被追诉人权利的保护做了详细的规定,提出了"及时获得律师帮助"、"有效辩护"等"最低刑事司法准则".加入<公民权利和政治权利国际公约>预示着我国应当参照人权约法,改革刑事司法制度,完善律师在侦查阶段的维权作用.     

Family Values: How Children's Lawyers Can Help Their Clients by Advocating for Parents

Children's lawyers too often view themselves as standing in opposition to parents in dependency proceedings. In this article, the authors argue that child advocates do a disservice to their clients by not using their considerable skills, role advantages, and moral authority to actively help parents. Noting that areas of common ground far exceed those places where the children's bar and the parents' bar might part company, the authors contend that children's lawyers have an obligation to actively fight for parents' rights. In particular, spending time early in a case to ensure that appropriate reunification services are being offered is well worth the investment, as it redounds to the benefit of all parties. Several concrete practice tips are offered regarding how children's lawyers can better serve their clients by regularly advocating for parents.     

Contingent-Fee Lawyers and Their Clients: Settlement Expectations, Settlement Realities, and Issues of Control in the Lawyer-Client Relationship

One hallmark of Herb Jacob's analyses of criminal courts—extensive consideration of the interaction among actors–was less pronounced in his work on civil justice, which was more focused on institutions and the politics behind the laws that those institutions administered. In the research I report here, my emphasis is squarely on the actors in the civil justice process: the relationship between contingency-fee lawyers and clients, and how that relationship plays out in the settlement process. In Felony Justice, Herb, and his coauthor James Eisenstein, focus on the courtroom workgroup as a case-processing (and, largely, case-settling) machine; clients are relatively peripheral. In my account, clients, both current and future, are extremely important in how the lawyer works to settle cases. In the criminal court workgroup, lawyers do not worry about where future clients will come from because police secure them. In contrast, the contingency-fee lawyer has constant concerns about future clients, and I argue, this concern provides a control over lawyers that prior analyses of the contingency fee have largely missed. This dynamic also may explain why the courtroom workgroups, or court communities, found in the criminal courts do not appear to exist in the civil justice system.     

維護内地舆香港當事人合法權益的有效制度

中國實行改革開放以來,内地舆香港的經濟往來日益频繁,涉及兩地的民商事爭議也越來越多。如何公正地處理這些爭議,切實維護内地舆香港當事人的合法權益是人民法院的重要職责。由於内地舆香港實行不同的法律制度,訴訟過程中的诸多問题都缺乏统一的程序和標凖,给爭議解決带來了许多困難。1981年,司法部經中央有關主管部門同意,     

"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.     

内地与香港律师管理之比较

应“内地与香港律师专业发展计划”的安排,2005年8月2日,大连市律师协会一行11人去香港进行了为期一个月的研修,经过对香港律师协会、大律师公会、律政司、立法会、委托公证人协会、中国法律服务(香港)有限公司等单位为期一周的参见、参察,在香港的p.c.woo&co律师事务所进行了为期三周的工作与学习,对两地的律师管理有了更深一步的了解。对于内地而言,真正意义上的律师管理制度的建立是在上个世纪80年代。1996年5月,《中华人民共和国律师法》正式颁布,为内地律师制度确立了法律基础,自此,内地的律师和律师事务所开始步入了专业化、规模化的…     

律师执业精神初探

具有中国特色的社会主义律师文化,是律师行业的精神支柱,而律师执业精神是律师文化的核心。加强律师文化建设,必须形成符合社会主义法治理念要求和律师职业特征的律师执业精神,并以此作为整个律师行业的价值追求取向。本文提出了律师应注意培养的十种执业精神,希望对律师文化建设有所裨益。     

律师性质初论

确定律师的性质，也就是明晰律师的本质特点，是界定律师与其它职业之间区别的关键所在。律师性质的正确界定，是律师制度得以正确发展的基础。     

Overstating the Satisfaction of Lawyers

Recent literature commonly reports US lawyers as disheartened and discontented, but more than two dozen statistically based studies report that the great majority of lawyers put themselves on the satisfied side of scales of job satisfaction. The claim of this article is that, in three ways, these statistically based studies convey an overly rosy impression of lawyers' attitudes: first, that many of those who put themselves above midpoints on satisfaction scales are barely more positive than negative about their careers and often have profound ambivalence about their work; second, that surveys conducted at a single point in time necessarily fail to include the views of those who once worked in that setting but have now gone elsewhere; and third, that few studies address the problems of bias that may be caused by lower rates of response from the least satisfied persons in the population sampled.     

坚持和完善中国特色社会主义律师制度 推进律师事业又好又快发展

11月22日至23日，全国律师工作会议在北京隆重召开。这次会议的主要任务是：认真学习贯彻党的十七大和十七届五中全会精神，学习贯彻《中共中央办公厅、国务院办公厅转发（司法部关于进一步加强和改进律师工作的意见）的通知》，