Legal Profession Commons^™

Overstating The Satisfaction Of Lawyers, David L. Chambers

Articles

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 …

Women In The Legal Profession, 1970-2010: A Study Of The Global Supply Of Lawyers, Ethan Michelson

Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies

This article represents the first effort to measure the changing global supply and composition of lawyers over a period of several decades. In it I assemble data on lawyer populations and gender compositions from eighty-six countries and use them to calculate estimates for the rest of the world in order to paint a truly global picture of the changing supply of lawyers in general and of female lawyers in particular. Most of the data supporting my analyses come from a unique and hitherto untapped source: individual-level census data. Results reveal a clear sequence in the global process of lawyer feminization. …

Will Law Firms Go Public?, Roberta S. Karmel

Roberta S. Karmel

Law in the United States is a big business and big law firms are a global business. Currently, under rules of the American Bar Association (ABA) and most states law, firms are not allowed either to include non-lawyers as partners or accept equity investments from non-lawyers. This Article will argue that (even if law firms retain the form of partnerships) they eventually will accept investments from third parties, and possibly even go public, but this development could lead to a loss of professionalism, as it has with other industries, and could also lead to the end of self-regulation. Among the …

Up Or Out And Into The Supreme Court: A Forecast For Hishon V. King And Spalding , Linda Randlett Kollar

Pepperdine Law Review

The author presents an extensive analysis of Title VII in an effort to forecast the forthcoming Supreme Court decision of Hishon v. King and Spalding. Included are the issues presented to the Court, the legislative history of Title VII, the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals' decision, and a historical inquiry of the applicable decisions of the Burger Court. Although the outcome of the case has yet to be decided, the author's informed prediction will guide commentaries in the future.

Late-Night Law Firms, Scott Hershovitz

Reviews

But it turns out that those late-night lawyers may not deserve the scorn that they get. In Sunlight and Settlement Mills, Nora Freeman Engstrom argues that firms like the ones that advertise late at night have developed practice models that achieve many of the aims that reformers have for no-fault accident compensation schemes. They deliver compensation cheaply and quickly, because they settle almost every claim and nearly never go to court. They resolve claims predictably and consistently, on account of cozy relationships with insurance adjusters that lead to a shared sense as to what different sorts of claims are …

The Relational Infrastructure Of Law Firm Culture And Regulation: The Exaggerated Death Of Big Law, Russell G. Pearce, Eli Wald

Faculty Scholarship

In recent years, the ethical infrastructure and culture of law firms has come under attack from commentators, such as Larry Ribstein, Bill Henderson, and Marc Galanter, who, in related ways, predict "the death of Big Law." They assert that the individualistic ethical infrastructure and culture of large firms undermine their commitment to professional values and will result in their failure to prepare for, and to survive, long term economic and technological trends. We identify a contradiction at the heart of this analysis. While these critiques correctly identify the individualistic flaws of law firm culture, they share the same individualistic assumptions. …

The Billable Hour Is Dead. Long Live…?, Robert Hirshon

Articles

The legal profession, of course, quickly comprehended that pursuant to the hourly approach to billing, two factors were paramount: the total amount of hours it took to complete a matter and the amount of dollars charged per hour. As both transactions and litigation became more complex, law firms found it necessary and easy to justify adding bodies (read: hours) to their clients' legal projects. With the number of legal projects increasing as a result of explosive economic growth in both developed and developing nations, the demand for top legal talent during most of the 1980s, 1990s, and early 2000s was …

Transactional Drafting: Using Law Firm Marketing Materials As A Research Resource For Teaching Drafting, Edward R. Becker

Articles

Since I started teaching drafting, I would like to think that I have continued to learn some lessons about teaching both the substance and the skills of transactional drafting. One of those lessons that I am going to be talking about today is one that I stumbled across by happy accident rather than one that I consciously sought. Specifically, I want to talk about and highlight the ways that law students can use law firm marketing materials to increase their understanding of both drafting and lawyering skills in law school and, hopefully, in practice.

Who's Eating Law Firms' Lunch? The Legal Service Providers, Law Schools And New Grads At The Table, William D. Henderson, Rachel M. Zahorsky

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

No Money, Mo' Problems: Why Unpaid Law Firm Internships Are Illegal And Unethical, Eric M. Fink

Eric M Fink

The practice of law firms offering unpaid internships in lieu of paid employment should concern law students and law school graduates who face an increasingly tight market for entry-level legal jobs. This article argues that such unpaid internships are impermissible under the Fair Labor Standards Act (“FLSA”). It further argues that lawyers who illegally hire unpaid interns should be subject to discipline under the ethics rules of the legal profession.

While law students collectively have an interest in ending this exploitative practice, they have a disincentive against taking action themselves, lest they hurt their prospects in the already unfavorable postgraduate …