"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.     

Advocates,experts, and suspects: three images of lawyers in Chinese media reports

Research on the public image of lawyers often focuses on lawyers’ role as advocates and neglects other representations. Based on the content analysis of 669 media reports of Chinese criminal cases between 1979 and 2009, this article provides a typology of lawyers’ media images: as advocates, as experts and as suspects. Even when lawyers are characterized as defenders of suspects, media depictions of their roles are vacuous and lawyers may be considered unnecessary and dispensable. Furthermore, the characterization of lawyers in the case stories has a binary quality that is contingent upon the media's substantive judgment of case outcomes. With findings from the Chinese case, the article calls for more attention to lawyers’ images in the media, both in China and in comparative research on the legal profession.     

The Professional Model of Law vs. The Business Model of Law: A Critical View of Opposing Trends in the United States of America and the People��s Republic of China

This study begins by reflecting on the literature characterizing the nature and function of a profession qua profession. It continues by arguing that based upon commonly used indicia of a profession that the practice of law in the US is de-professionalizing in significant ways and morphing towards a functioning business model. The related advantages of such a development for American society, its lawyers and their clients, including especially criminal defendants are critically discussed. It then traces the emergence and ascendancy of the rule of law in China and corresponding quest to institutionalize the practice of law in China as a profession. The study concludes by exploring the alternative advantages of applying the business model to Chinese legal practice. It recommends that embracing a paradigm shift away from the professional model towards a business model, comparable to what is happening in the US, would be to the greater advantage of Chinese lawyers in terms of enhanced authority, increased self-regulation, as well as providing greater leverage in advocating client interests.     

Minimal Semantics and Legal Interpretation

In this paper I will tackle three issues. First, I aim to briefly outline the backbone of semantic minimalism, while focusing on the idea of ‘liberal truth conditions’ developed by Emma Borg in her book ‘Minimal Semantics’. Secondly, I will provide an account of the three principal views in legal interpretation: intentionalism, textualism and purposivism. All of them are based on a common denominator labelled by lawyers ‘literal meaning’. In the paper I suggest a novel way of viewing this common denominator as almost identical to the Borgian ‘liberal truth conditions’, at least at a conceptual level. In the third section I will focus on the conceptual similarities between the two ideas. I intend to depict that, although legal theorists do not admit it explicitly, they treat literal legal meaning as minimal propositional content that can be ascribed liberal truth conditions. There are two main objections to liberal truth conditions: their under-determinacy and unintuitive character. Both objections can be applied to ‘literal meaning’. However, the idea of liberal truth conditions gives an adequate account of what lawyers call literal meaning and is helpful in explaining the mechanism of understanding of provisions and reasons leading to the necessity of statutory interpretation.     

From refuge to trap: formalist misadventures of Poland’s postsocialist legal profession

ABSTRACT

Since 2015 the populist government of the Law and Justice Party in Poland has spearheaded a highly effective campaign against the country’s lawyers, encountering relatively muted social opposition. Using Bourdieuan lenses, the article traces the roots of that remarkable institutional weakness of the Polish legal profession to the highly formalist approach to law and legal thinking that Poland’s lawyers espoused. Prior to the fall of communism, and in democratic Poland, the role of lawyers in society was to act as guardians of “neatness” of the legal system – or that system’s internal clarity, cohesion, and completeness. Such a sterile approach to legal practice was initially attractive, among other reasons, because it protected the legal profession from difficult legitimacy challenges stemming from that profession’s pre-1989 coexistence with the communist regime. With time, however, the refuge that formalism offered became a trap that undermined lawyers’ political and economic power.     

Workers with Disabilities Between Legal Changes and Persisting Exclusion: How Contradictory Rights Shape Legal Mobilization

It has become commonplace within disability sociolegal scholarship to argue that, in the last 30 years, a new legal and policy approach to disability has emerged, leading to a paradigm shift from a social protection framework to an antidiscrimination model. Some authors have stressed, however, that the new model has not fully replaced the older social protection approach. Yet little is still known about how the coexistence of these different models impacts on the everyday experience of disability in the workplace and on potential legal mobilization. Based on interviews with workers with disabilities who mobilized the law to obtain reasonable accommodation in Belgium combined with an analysis of evolving Belgian legal schemes relating to disability, this article explores how interactions between social, labor, and antidiscrimination rights shape legal mobilization of persons with disabilities in the workplace. We find that individual's initial self‐identification as workers or persons with disabilities influences how they frame their claim and the kind of legal norms they refer to in a first stage but that both their identification and their rights consciousness evolve and change through the course of legal mobilization as they interact with various professionals and navigate between the different concepts and rights available in current law.     

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.     

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.     

Boycott,Resistance and the Law: Cause Lawyering in Conflict and Authoritarianism

This article examines the role of cause lawyers in conflicted or authoritarian contexts where the chances of legal victory are often minimal. Drawing upon the literature on resistance, performance, memory studies, legal consciousness and the sociology of lawyers, the paper examines how cause lawyers challenge and subvert power. The paper first explores the tactics and strategies of cause lawyers who boycott legal proceedings and the relationship between such boycotts and broader political struggles, legitimacy and law. It then examines why and how cause lawyers engage in fairly hopeless legal struggles as acts of instrumental resistance (the ‘sand in the cogs’), transforming courts into sites of symbolic resistance, and using law as a form of memory work. The paper argues that boycott of and resistance through the courts can counter the use of law as an instrument of wickedness and a tool of denial and preserves a ‘stubborn optimism’ in the rule of law.     

Lawyering on the margins: lawyers and drug-criminals before Mexican federal courts

This paper explores some of the empirical dimensions of the way in which lawyers litigate drug crime cases in Mexican federal courts. In particular, the aim is to illustrate two aspects of the relationship between the legal profession practice and the crimes related to the trafficking, production, possession and transportation of illegal drugs in Mexico. The investigation focuses on whether the distinction between ‘narco-lawyers’ and ‘lawyers defending other crimes’ could be pertinent and useful for classifying particular forms of legal profession exercise. Moreover, analysis also extends to how narco-lawyers ‘work’ in practice, and what specific practices could distinguish them from their peers. Research findings suggest that lawyers who defend drug-criminals in Mexico (1) do offer a better explanation to their clients regarding the status of the judicial process, (2) present more evidence (witnesses, in particular) to support their client's innocence, and (3) obtain softer sentences (4) in less time than those lawyers who do not represent drug traffickers. Taken together, these findings suggest that drug trafficking may be contributing to a distinctive way of exercising the legal profession in Mexico.     

Lawyers' perspectives on ‘what is court-connected mediation for?’

This article analyses the results of an empirical investigation into lawyers' perspectives of the goal of court-connected mediation in the Supreme Court of Tasmania, Australia. The findings of other empirical studies are drawn upon to contextualise the results. The data reveal a tendency for lawyers to emphasise settlement in accordance with the law as the main purpose of court-connected mediation. There was evidence that some lawyers maintain a competitive approach to court-connected mediation, seeking to ‘win’ for their clients with minimal regard to the other party's goals or to achieve outcomes that reflect a legal assessment of the case. However, where non-legal, satisfaction-related needs were met, many lawyers viewed such outcomes as particularly positive. A mixed range of views was revealed, with the common goals of an opportunity for settlement and a focus on law as a reference point. The findings contribute to knowledge about lawyers' understandings of ‘what is mediation for?’.     

Lawyer rankings either do not matter for litigation outcomes or are redundant

I investigate the success of litigants in tax cases in England and Wales between 1996 and 2010. I explore the effect upon success of having better-ranked legal representation, according to rankings of barristers published by Chambers. I find that, for a variety of model specifications, there is no significant positive effect of having better-ranked legal representation. After conducting a sensitivity analysis, I conclude that better-ranked legal representation might have a positive effect on litigation outcomes, but only if better-ranked lawyers receive cases that are substantially more difficult to win. However, if better-ranked lawyers receive substantially more difficult cases, this suggests consumers of legal representation are sophisticated enough to dispense with legal rankings.     

The making of the Canadian legal profession: a hybrid heritage

The Canadian legal profession emerged from the confluence of two distinct traditions: the American and the English. The colonies of British North America followed the pre-revolutionary American model of a unified legal profession, according to which all lawyers could practise as barristers and solicitors. American and Canadian lawyers pursued a client- and market-driven, eclectic type of practice that was receptive to innovations – such as the large law firm, the contingency fee, and university legal education – that were strongly resisted in England. On the governance side, however, Canadian lawyers created an indigenous but English-inflected model whereby professional self-governance was delegated to a statutorily-created body that had the power to compel all lawyers to join if they wished to practise law. With their commitment to client-centred service and strong governance, Canadian lawyers long enjoyed a cooperative and productive relationship with provincial governments, unlike the adversarial one characteristic of the United States or the long benign neglect of the legal professions by the English state. It is argued that this historical pattern may help to explain the continuing strength of the self-governance model in Canada at a time when it is being questioned and radically reformed elsewhere in the common law world.     

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.     

论刑事律师的利益冲突规制

作为律师职业伦理中的重要规则,利益冲突及其规制在我国刑事领域受到了不应有的忽视。规制利益冲突体现了律师消极的忠诚义务,是司法程序理性运行的要求,也有助于维护律师的职业形象。根据利益冲突的严重程度,可将利益冲突划分为直接的利益冲突和间接的利益冲突。基于对利益冲突的严重性、实体真实的发现、当事人获得律师帮助的权利、律师自由执业的机会等因素的考虑,律师存在强制性规避和任意性规避两种方式。违反利益冲突规则既会使律师个人承担责任,也会带来程序性的法律后果。目前,律师利益冲突的规制在我国尚处于起步阶段,未来在利益冲突的类型划分、律师规避、法律后果以及司法审查等方面都有待进一步完善。     

The advice lawyers give themselves: the Canadian Bar Association's campaign for timekeeping in the mid-twentieth century

This paper is a historical analysis of how the Canadian organized bar urged lawyers to adopt strict timekeeping practices and use time as the basis for their legal fees. The Canadian Bar Association's compilation of data on the legal profession in the late 1940s–the collection of ‘facts’, the ‘scientific’ nature of this collection–foreshadowed the way that the organized bar would couch its advocacy for the practice of timekeeping in the 1970s. The pioneering experts on law office management in Canada promised lawyers significant profit increases and gave minimal attention to the relationship between legal fees and client's interests.     

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.     

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。