Law & Society: The Legal Profession eJournal最新文献

{"title":"Halting the Profession's Female Brain Drain While Increasing the Provision of Legal Services to the Poor: A Proposal to Revamp and Expand Emeritus Attorney Programs","authors":"Claudine V. Pease-Wingenter","doi":"10.2139/SSRN.2146093","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/SSRN.2146093","url":null,"abstract":"This article is currently in the editorial process and will be made public soon: Claudine V. Pease-Wingenter, Halting the Profession’s Female Brain Drain While Increasing the Provision of Legal Services to the Poor: A Proposal to Revamp and Expand Emeritus Attorney Programs, 37 OKLA. CITY. U.L. REV. 433 (2012). The article describes the current female brain drain in the legal profession. Despite years of gender parity in law school, women currently comprise only about a third of practitioners. A number of factors lead to this situation, but a significant cause is the frequent “perfect storm” of simultaneously establishing oneself in a demanding new profession while also meeting significant caregiving responsibilities at home. Women often take time off from paid employment for family reasons, but find it difficult to return to the legal profession after the isolation of such a hiatus. The article advocates reforms to the licensure rules to empower lawyers on such a hiatus to do pro bono work. Not only could the provision of such pro bono services make a huge dent on the “justice gap” that currently plagues our nation and undermines our legal system, but it could also alleviate the trend of women who drift away from the legal profession permanently. To explain the underrepresentation of women in the legal profession, as well as the disincentives attorneys face in doing pro bono when they are not engaged in the paid practice of law, a significant amount of research was done. This document contains several unpublished appendices to the above-titled article, which contain the fruits of that research: • Appendix I provides gender statistics of attorneys from a sampling of thirty-nine law firms of varying sizes from diverse communities around the United States. • Appendix II is a state-by-state summary of the direct costs imposed on attorneys to maintain a law license. • Appendix III is an index of the various states’ MCLE requirements. • Appendix IV is a description of the emeritus attorney and other programs whereby non-practicing attorneys are permitted by certain jurisdictions under certain circumstances to practice law only on a pro bono basis without incurring the financial costs associated with maintaining bar licensure.","PeriodicalId":330356,"journal":{"name":"Law & Society: The Legal Profession eJournal","volume":"41 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2012-09-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130984244","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Smart Growth: The Large Law Firm in the Twenty-First Century","authors":"Eli Wald","doi":"10.2139/SSRN.2135245","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/SSRN.2135245","url":null,"abstract":"A “standard story” has emerged to explain the growth of the large firm, an account by now so well accepted that it hardly gets challenged or revisited. This standard account, however, fails to adequately describe the actual rich and vibrant world of large law firms. Instead, it only explains a subset of the large law firm universe, the old Wall Street elite firms and their progeny. A key, therefore, to understanding the complex world of large law firms, is to broaden the scope of inquiry and move past the standard account as a one-size-fits-all explanation for the rise and growth of the large firm. Offering a detailed case study of one Am Law 200 firm, this article questions some of the basic assumptions and predictions of the standard story, suggesting that large law firms may be able to move from a narrow emphasis on corporate law and the service of large corporate entities to more diversified practice areas and client bases; to transition from an associate-heavy organizational structure to a stable partner-heavy model; and shift from brittle, organic growth models to smart, strategic alternatives. Whereas the organic growth of early elite large law firms in the twentieth century was, in many ways, a function of increased demand for corporate legal services by large entity clients, in the aftermath of the Great Recession it is not at all clear that similar demand will persist, or that it necessitates the organic growth of large law firms. Some large law firms would find it effective and profitable to grow globally by opening offices and by recruiting attorneys from around the world with the goal of targeting the business of global entity clients. Others will remain or become international in the limited sense of serving clients all over the world from only one main location in the United States or outside of it, with or without the use of a global lawyer workforce via out-sourcing and off-shoring. Some firms will remain mid-size, big enough to offer high-end, specialized legal services in complex transactions nationally, and perhaps even super-nationally, but not large enough to offer global legal services. And yet others will choose to remain or become regional actors, offering more localized expertise, within and outside the United States. Ultimately, the fate of large law firms depends not on a generic commitment to growing organically, but rather on their ability to develop and implement smart strategic growth plans attractive to their clients and attuned to their needs.","PeriodicalId":330356,"journal":{"name":"Law & Society: The Legal Profession eJournal","volume":"3 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2012-08-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130820086","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Crisis of the American Law School","authors":"P. Campos","doi":"10.36646/mjlr.46.1.crisis","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.36646/mjlr.46.1.crisis","url":null,"abstract":"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 accounted for 2.01 percent of the nation's GDP: by 2009 that figure had shrunk to 1.37 percent-a 32 percent decrease. These two trends are not mutually sustainable. If the cost of becoming a lawyer continues to rise while the economic advantage conferred by a law degree continues to fall, then eventually both the market for new lawyers and for admission to law school will crash. In the early years of the 21st century, this abstract theoretical observation has begun to be confirmed by concrete events. The ongoing contraction in the employment market for new lawyers has combined with the continuing increase in the cost of legal education to produce what has begun to be recognized as a genuine crisis for both law schools and the legal profession.","PeriodicalId":330356,"journal":{"name":"Law & Society: The Legal Profession eJournal","volume":"4 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2012-07-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130209301","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Limits of Unbundled Legal Assistance: A Randomized Study in a Massachusetts District Court and Prospects for the Future","authors":"D. Greiner, C. Pattanayak, J. Hennessy","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.1948286","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1948286","url":null,"abstract":"We persuaded entities conducting two civil Gideon pilot programs to randomize which potential clients would receive offers of traditional attorney-client relationships from professional service provider staff attorneys and which would receive only limited (“unbundled”) assistance. In both pilot programs potential clients were defendants in housing eviction proceedings, and both programs were oversubscribed. In this Article, we report the results of one of these two resulting randomized control trials, which we label the “District Court Study,” after the type of the court in which it took place. In the District Court Study, almost all study-eligible eviction defendants received limited assistance in the form of help in filling out answer and discovery request forms, and most also attended an instructional session on the summary eviction process. After receiving this limited assistance, each member of a randomly selected treated group received an offer of a traditional attorney-client relationship from one of the legal services provider’s staff attorneys; each member of the corresponding randomly selected control group received no such offer. We compare outcomes for the treated (offered traditional representation from a service provider staff attorney) group versus the control (no such offer) group on a variety of dimensions, focusing primarily on possession of the unit, financial consequences of the litigation, and measures of court burden. At least for the clientele involved in this District Court Study, a clientele recruited and chosen by the service provider’s proactive, timely, specific, and selective outreach and intake system, an offer of full representation mattered. Approximately two thirds of defendants in the treated group, versus about one-third of defendants in the control group, retained possession of their units at the end of litigation. Using a highly conservative proxy for financial consequences, treated group defendants received payments or rent waivers worth a net of 9.4 months of rent per case, versus 1.9 months of rent per case in the control group. Both results were statistically significant. Meanwhile, although treated cases did take longer to reach judgment, the offer of representation caused no increase in court burden as measured by other, more salient metrics. Our results are interesting on a different dimension. A fundamental assumption of the adversary system is that the “right” answer will emerge from a process of contested facts and law in which both parties are represented by competent counsel. In our treated group, 86% of plaintiffs and 97% of defendants were represented. Under the aforementioned assumption, then, the outcomes in our treated group are a strong proxy for the “right” results in summary eviction cases, at least with respect to the class of potential clients involved in the study. The disparity in outcomes between our treated and control groups suggests that, with respect to the clientele in this study,","PeriodicalId":330356,"journal":{"name":"Law & Society: The Legal Profession eJournal","volume":"29 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2012-03-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126075594","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Contracts Meet Henry Ford","authors":"Barak D Richman","doi":"10.2139/SSRN.1988991","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/SSRN.1988991","url":null,"abstract":"Legal scholars and legal educators view contracts as a welfare-maximizing (or optimal risk-allocating) device for two or more parties. Because we cling to this principal-driven paradigm, we think of lawyers only as the proverbial “transaction cost engineers,” the loyal agents of parties to a transaction. And whenever we observe contracts that appear to be suboptimal, we blame agency costs. We instead should apply the literature on organizational economics to understand the production of contracts by the modern law firm. This literature better illustrates how law firms organize, why they produce the products they do, and why those products sometimes exhibit strangely inefficient features. These inefficiencies are not the consequence of agency costs or a lack of attorneys’ fidelity to their clients; they instead illustrate the limits — and, indirectly, the strengths — of large organizations. Indeed, observing that legal products do not perfectly match contemporary needs might be no less provocative than observing that Detroit is long overdue to produce high-mileage cars.","PeriodicalId":330356,"journal":{"name":"Law & Society: The Legal Profession eJournal","volume":"34 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2012-01-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124574453","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Role of Practice in Legal Education: National Report for Taiwan","authors":"C. Chen","doi":"10.2139/SSRN.1984374","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/SSRN.1984374","url":null,"abstract":"We analyze a firm's job-assignment and worker-monitoring decisions when workers face occasional crises. Firms prefer to assign good workers to a difficult task and to not employ bad workers. Firms This article aims at evaluating the role of practice in legal education in Taiwan. Part I provides the general structure of legal education by examining some of the key elements. It also comprises of a detailed description of the bar examination and pre-service training. Part II focuses on practice elements within the law school curriculum, especially the judicial court externship course. Part III concludes with a call that law schools in Taiwan should take a greater role in offering practice-related courses or course components as a formal part of legal education.","PeriodicalId":330356,"journal":{"name":"Law & Society: The Legal Profession eJournal","volume":"24 3 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2012-01-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125673622","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Deploying Individual-Level Resources Under Constraints: Evidence from the UK M&A Legal Advisory Market","authors":"Olivier Chatain, Philipp Meyer-Doyle","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.1974411","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1974411","url":null,"abstract":"In this paper, we develop and test a framework to better understand how firms strategically deploy their individual-level resources to opportunities. We analyze the allocation of individual-level resources (lawyers) to projects (M&A mandates) in the UK corporate M&A legal market. We find evidence that firms adapt their allocation decisions to deal with the constraints on resource deployment associated with resource scarcity and congestion. Specifically, firms appear to adopt five strategies to manage their constrained resources: Load Equalization, Selective Stretching, Assortative Matching, Relationship Building, and Relational Capital Substitution. We also find suggestive evidence of firm level heterogeneity in the firm’s ability to appropriately deploy resources. Overall, this paper refines the understanding of the resource deployment process and of individuals as rent-generating assets.","PeriodicalId":330356,"journal":{"name":"Law & Society: The Legal Profession eJournal","volume":"12 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2011-12-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130255704","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Empiricism and the Rising Incidence of Coauthorship in Law","authors":"Thomas B. Ginsburg, T. Miles","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.1762323","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1762323","url":null,"abstract":"The recent growth of empirical scholarship in law, which some have termed “empirical legal studies,” has received much attention. A less noticed implication of this trend is its potential impact on the manner of scholarly production in legal academia. A common prediction is that academic collaboration rises with scholarly specialization. As the complexity of a field grows, more and more diverse types of human capital are needed to make a contribution. This paper presents two tests of whether empiricism has spurred more co-authorship in law. First, the paper shows that the fraction of articles in the top fifteen law reviews that were empirical or co-authored (or both) trended upwards between 2000 and 2010. The increase in empirical articles accounted for a substantial share of the growth in co-authored articles, and the correlation between co-authorship and empiricism persisted after controlling for numerous other influences. Second, the paper examines the articles published since 1989 in two prominent, faculty-edited journals specializing in law & economics: the Journal of Legal Studies and the Journal of Law, Economics & Organization. Co-authored articles were far more common in these journals than in the general-interest, student-edited law reviews – a pattern which itself is consistent with the specialization hypothesis. The share of articles without empirical analysis or formal models in these journals plummeted over this period, while co-authorship rose sharply. These results support the view that specialization, and specifically the growth of empirical scholarship, has contributed to the trend of co-authorship in legal academia.","PeriodicalId":330356,"journal":{"name":"Law & Society: The Legal Profession eJournal","volume":"24 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2011-10-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"120943629","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Disruptive Internet Innovation and Communications Law","authors":"M. C. Riley","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.1933611","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1933611","url":null,"abstract":"The Internet has become a central platform for communications and culture worldwide. In the process, innovation on the Internet has led to tremendous economic, social, and democratic benefits that could not have been predicted in advance. Disruptive technologies, in particular, shape the Internet and produce a vast portion of its value. Disruptive innovation has a transformative effect on markets and produces significant tensions with existing businesses. To defend their business models and revenue streams, embattled incumbents have strong incentives to stifle the development and use of disruptive technologies. As the services, devices, applications, and networks that comprise the Internet evolve, many are shifting away from the Internet’s open roots towards a closed system, in which a company with power at one layer can control the behavior of its horizontal and vertical peers. The result is a potential for significant stifling of disruptive innovation in the mobile Internet ecosystem, and a real risk of lost future social and economic benefits. Strong legal protections are needed to ensure that the Internet avoids stagnation and remains friendly to valuable disruptive innovations. Recent actions by the FCC to sift through this context and adopt net neutrality rules will have an impact on Internet innovation. However, there is a real possibility that the FCC’s rules, as adopted, will facilitate the emergence of restrictions throughout the Internet’s layers, particularly in the context of mobile broadband networks. This paper engages in a targeted analysis of recent net neutrality regulations adopted to govern Internet access services, concluding that more work must be done to ensure the future of an open, dynamic, and disruptive innovation-friendly Internet.","PeriodicalId":330356,"journal":{"name":"Law & Society: The Legal Profession eJournal","volume":"40 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2011-09-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116687960","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Trademark and Copyright Enforcement in the Shadow of IP Law","authors":"William T. Gallagher","doi":"10.2139/SSRN.1990588","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/SSRN.1990588","url":null,"abstract":"In recent years, as Congress has created new intellectual property (IP) rights and courts have often interpreted those rights broadly, legal scholars have frequently decried the expanded scope of protection afforded IP owners in most substantive areas of IP law. According to this critique, the over-expansion of IP rights throughout the past two decades harms competition, chills free speech, and diminishes the public domain as increasingly broad areas of social life are brought within the scope of strong IP protection. While this over-expansion theory reflects an important — indeed, foundational — policy debate concerning the proper balance between IP owners’ rights and the public’s rights of access to the information, ideas, and expressions that IP protects, it is incomplete because it focuses largely on what Congress or the courts do. In reality, most enforcement of IP rights takes place not in court, but in the everyday practices of IP owners and their lawyers. “Cease and desist” letters, phone calls, and negotiations with alleged infringers constitute the bulk of IP enforcement efforts in trademark and copyright practice. To be sure, these efforts take place in the “shadow” of IP law and are therefore influenced by it. But it is in these everyday practices — and not in trial or appellate courts — that most IP rights are asserted, resisted, and negotiated. Thus, if we want to know whether IP rights are over-enforced or over-extended, we need to know how, why, and to what effect these rights are exercised in the everyday practices of IP owners and their lawyers. To date, however, IP scholarship has focused virtually no attention on this critical arena of everyday practice. This Article presents findings from a qualitative empirical study of the trademark and copyright disputing process outside of court, based on original data derived from semi-structured interviews with experienced IP attorneys who advise clients on how to enforce their rights. This research is one of the first studies to examine how trademark and copyright claims are actually enforced in practice. One significant finding from this study is that “repeat player” trademark and copyright owners (and their lawyers) knowingly assert weak IP claims at times — precisely because it works, as enforcement targets are unable or unwilling to resist claims that may lack legal merit due to the costs and uncertainties of threatened litigation. Moreover, the lawyers who assert weak IP claims have ready practical and ethical justifications for their actions. This study also suggests that legal sanctions directed at deterring over-reaching IP enforcement are unlikely to be effective because most such over-reaching occurs in informal disputing processes outside of the legal system.","PeriodicalId":330356,"journal":{"name":"Law & Society: The Legal Profession eJournal","volume":"85 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2011-09-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123829518","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}