Legal Profession Commons^™

Gaining From The System: Lessons From The Law School Survey Of Student Engagement About Student Development In Law School, Carole Silver, Louis Rocconi, Heather Haeger, Lindsay Watkins

Articles by Maurer Faculty

This paper considers the factors that influence law students' assessment of their professional and academic development during law school. It uses responses of 5,612 third- and fourth-year law students to the Law School Survey of Student Engagement to identify student activities and behaviors that relate to professional and academic gains; individual and law school characteristics also are examined. Four aspects of the law school experience emerge as integral parts of students' professional and academic development.

Nonlawyers Influencing Lawyers: Too Many Cooks In The Kitchen Or Stone Soup?, Michele M. Destefano

Articles

No abstract provided.

Sisters In Law: Black Women Lawyers' Struggle For Advancement, Carla Pratt

Faculty Articles

While the presence of women in law school and the legal profession has improved greatly, the uncomfortable reality is that women tend to occupy positions in the legal profession that subordinate them to men. This reality is even more glaring when the position of black women is examined. Black women carry the burden of multiple consciousness which influences every aspect of their professional lives. Multiple consciousness means that black women must be mindful of their professional identity, their gender and their race in navigating the pipeline to power. This paper will explore the multiple consciousness that intersecting identities invoke and …

The Pedigree Problem: Are Law School Ties Choking The Profession?, William D. Henderson, Rachel M. Zahorsky

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

Where Is The "Quality Movement" In Law Practice?, William H. Simon

Faculty Scholarship

The "Quality Movement" that originated in industrial production and has since influenced the professions prescribes standardized work, root cause analysis of errors, peer review, and performance measurement. While these reforms have transformed medicine and some other professions, their influence has lagged in the legal profession. This Essay reviews the limited progress of the reforms in law and assesses the cultural, institutional, and doctrinal obstacles they face.

The Virtue Of Low Barriers To Becoming A Lawyer: Promoting Liberal And Democratic Values [With Sinna Nasseri], Russell G. Pearce, Sinna Nasseri

Faculty Scholarship

This article offers a new perspective on how to determine whether barriers to practicing law are appropriate. It identifies a connection between those barriers and the role of legal services providers (‘lawyers’) in permitting individuals to obtain their basic political and economic rights in a liberal democracy. Democratic values require making legal services as equally available as possible to all citizens, while liberal values dictate that each individual has access in order to enforce human rights, compete in a market economy, and engage in a legal system grounded in the rule of law. Liberal and democratic values therefore require the …

Professional Identity As Advocacy, Robert Rubinson

All Faculty Scholarship

The legal profession adheres to a story of a unified profession. Nevertheless, the profession has distinct professional sub-groups which repeatedly represent clients with interests adverse to those represented by attorneys who identify with other sub-groups. The idea of "professional identity as advocacy" describes how such professional sub-groups accuse opposing subgroups of greed, self-aggrandizement, or worse. This is most notable in two areas: personal injury litigation and criminal cases. This process has two seemingly contradictory consequences. First, it renders narrow areas extraordinarily visible, thus defining popular discourse and conceptions about lawyers and law. Second, it masks vast areas of litigation and …

The Crisis Of The American Law School, Paul Campos

Publications

The economist Herbert Stein once remarked that if something cannot go on forever, it will stop. Over the past four decades, the cost of legal education in America has seemed to belie this aphorism: it has gone up relentlessly. Private law school tuition increased by a factor of four in real, inflation-adjusted terms between 1971 and 2011, while resident tuition at public law schools has nearly quadrupled in real terms over just the past two decades. Meanwhile, for more than thirty years, the percentage of the American economy devoted to legal services has been shrinking. In 1978 the legal sector …

Making Civility Democratic, Amy R. Mashburn

UF Law Faculty Publications

Historically, the concept of civility has been bound up with undemocratic notions of hierarchy and deference. Using insights from studies of civility by social psychologists, linguists, sociologists, historians, and political theorists, this article advances the theory that the legal profession’s self-consciously isolating professionalism ideology allows judges and disciplinary tribunals to apply deference-based notions of civility in their decisions to sanction lawyers. This theory would predict that the lawyers most likely to be sanctioned for incivility and rudeness are those from whom society expects the most deference. To test this theory, the author conducted an empirical study of every available case …

Paradigm Shift, William D. Henderson, Rachel M. Zahorsky

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

The Challenges Of Developing Cross-Cultural Legal Ethics Education, Professional Development, And Guidance For The Legal Professions, Philip Genty

Faculty Scholarship

The broad goal of this paper is to describe the need, and provide a framework, for engaging in cross-cultural conversations among lawyers, law teachers, and others, who are using legal ethics as a vehicle for improving the legal professions and the delivery of legal services. All legal cultures struggle with the question of how to educate students and lawyers to be ethical professionals and how to regulate the legal profession effectively. The purpose of the cross-cultural conversations discussed in this paper would be to develop principles of legal ethics education, professional development, and regulation of the legal professions that can …

The Knowledge Guild: The Legal Profession In An Age Of Technological Change, Paul F. Kirgis

Nevada Law Journal

No abstract provided.

The Class Of 2009: Recession Or Restructuring?, William D. Henderson

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

Special Introduction: October 2010, Lauren K. Robel

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

Know The Mission: A Lawyer's Duty To A Nonprofit Entity During An Internal Investigation, Joseph Anthony Valenti

St. Thomas Law Review

Neither Black's Law Dictionary nor Merriam-Webster's Dictionary defines the term internal investigation. Practitioners note that "[t]here is no standard definition of the term 'internal investigation.'" Without knowing what an internal investigation is, how can one define who conducts them and where they are conducted?

Transnational Legal Practice 2009, Carole Silver, Laurel S. Terry, Ellyn S. Rosen

Articles by Maurer Faculty

This article identifies some of the most important U.S. and international developments in transnational legal practice and provides citations for further research. The article begins by briefly reviewing the impact of the recession on legal services. The second section focuses on international developments. It identifies some of the ongoing efforts to implement the 2007 U.K. Legal Services Act, including the issuance of the influential Hunt and Smedley reports. It also provides information about law reform initiatives in France, Scotland and Korea. This section of the article also provides information about Canadian and Australian developments regarding admission of foreign applicants and …

What We Don't Know Can Hurt Us: The Need For Empirical Research In Regulating Lawyers And Legal Services In The Global Economy, Carole Silver

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

Rise Of Political Populism And The Trouble With The Legal Profession In China, Dongsheng Zang

Articles

This essay looks into recent efforts by the ruling party in China to tighten control of the judiciary, the lawyers and prosecutors under the slogan of "harmonious society" in the last couple of years. This reversed the direction of judicial reform under the leadership of Xiao Yang, during his tenure as President of the Supreme People's Court before 2008. The trouble with the legal profession in China, the essay asserts, is not only that it loses its professional autonomy thus its ability to act as a sociopolitical force that is independent from the ruling political party; but also, by virtue …

Who Wants To Be A Muggle? The Diminished Legitimacy Of Law As Magic, Mark Edwin Burge

Faculty Scholarship

In the Harry Potter world, the magical population lives among the non-magical Muggle population, but we Muggles are largely unaware of them. This secrecy is by elaborate design and is necessitated by centuries-old hostility to wizards by the non-magical majority. The reasons behind this hostility, when combined with the similarities between Harry Potter-stylemagic and American law, make Rowling’s novels into a cautionary tale for the legal profession that it not treat law as a magic unknowable to non-lawyers. Comprehensibility — as a self-contained, normative value in the enactment interpretation, and practice of law — is given short-shrift by the legal …

Taxes And Death: The Rise And Demise Of An American Law Firm, Milton C. Regan

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Misconduct by lawyers in law firms is often attributed to pressures from increasing competition for legal services. Modern firms do face fierce competitive pressures. We can gain more subtle insights, however, by focusing on the specific markets in which particular firms operate and the ways in which forms of influence in law firms interact with common patterns of behavior in organizations.

This paper, a chapter in the collection Law Firms, Legal Culture, and Legal Practice, draws on this type ofanalytical framework to provide a case study of the experience of Jenkens & Gilchrist, a national law firm that had …

Taking Empirical Research Seriously, Susan Saab Fortney

Faculty Scholarship

This essay considers how empirical research on the legal profession can bridge the divide between theory, social science, and the ethical practice of law. After providing background information on the growing field of empirical legal research, Part I of this essay focuses on developments in empirical legal research on lawyering. Part II discusses how collaboration with practitioners and other stakeholders can help researchers address challenges related to accessing data. Once data are obtained, Part III suggests how dissemination and sharing of research can link the academy and practicing lawyers. The conclusion urges a collaborative course of action for legal ethics …

Maybe Mom And Dad Were Right: Musings On The Economic Downturn, Gary A. Munneke

Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications

This issue of the Journal takes a look at the legal profession as it confronts the most serious economic downturn since the Great Depression, but the focus is not on what went wrong, or why. The articles in this issue examine how lawyers and law firms can survive, and thrive again when the economy improves.

The Bursting Of The Pedigree Bubble, William D. Henderson

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

"Old And Making Hay:" The Results Of The Pro Bono Institute Firm Survey On The Viability Of A "Second Acts" Program To Transition Attorneys To Retirement Through Pro Bono Work, Kenneth Glenn Dau-Schmidt, Esther Lardent, Reena Glazer, Kellen Ressmeyer

Articles by Maurer Faculty

In his 1998 Fairchild Lecture, Professor Marc Galanter proposed the idea that senior attorneys should be encouraged to undertake "a second 'public service' career" as a way of transitioning to retirement. The logic for encouraging such "Second Acts" in lawyers' careers is compelling. As Professor Galanter has demonstrated, in the coming years, there will be record numbers of attorneys navigating the transition to retirement as the "Baby Boomers" reach their golden years. This substantial body of highly skilled lawyers could have a significant impact on fulfilling unmet needs for legal representation. If even 5% of the practicing attorneys over sixty-five …

Indiana's Latest Study Of The Legal Needs Of The Poor, Amy Applegate, Monica A. Fennell

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

An Empirical Analysis Of Lateral Lawyer Trends From 2000 To 2007: The Emerging Equilibrium For Corporate Law Firms, William D. Henderson, Leonard Bierman

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

Cravath By The Sea: Recruitment In The Large Halifax Law Firm, 1900-1955, Jeffrey Haylock

Dalhousie Law Journal

The traditional view is that regularized, meritocratic hiring in Canadian law firms had to wait until the 1960s, with the rise in importance of Ontario university law schools. There was, however, more regional variation than this view allows. After an overview of the rise of large firms in the U.S. and Canada, and of the modern hiring strategies (the "Cravath system") that developed in New York in the early twentieth century, the author considers whether Halifax firms were employing these strategies between 1900 and 1955. Nepotistic hiring continued unabated; however, the three large firms of the period recruited young students …

Tales Of Two Regimes For Regulating Limited Liability Law Firms In The Us And Australia: Client Protection And Risk Management Lessons, Susan Saab Fortney

Faculty Scholarship

This essay contrasts the regimes that allow limited liability partnerships in the US and fully incorporated legal practices in Australia. The essay argues that Australia has taken advantage of an opportunity to develop innovative and necessary regulation of law firm ethical infrastructure with the introduction of incorporated legal practices, but the United States has not yet adequately addressed the consumer and ethical risks of limited liability partnerships. This essay raises the issue of whether Australia’s requirement that incorporated law firms should implement “appropriate management systems” to ensure ethical conduct is a model that could fruitfully be applied to all law …

Book Review Of Juris Types: Learning Law Through Self-Understanding, Richard E. Redding

Journal of Legal Education

No abstract provided.

More Than Just Law School: Global Perspectives On The Place Of The Practical In Legal Education, James Maxeiner

All Faculty Scholarship

Foreign experiences remind us that legal education is not just law school. They inform us that we should seek for ways not just to integrate theoretical and practical teaching, but to assure that our students or our graduates get real experience with practice. The assumption that law schools are the exclusive place for preparation for the profession of law is bad for students, bad for bar, bad for law schools, bad for the legal system and bad for society. We should look to see what we can do best and should encourage other institutions to do what they can do …