Sida Liu

When one of the world’s leading authorities on the legal profession writes about the demise of law firms, we should pay some good attention to it. Arguably, the financial crisis in 2008 changed the mindset of many law firm partners and their associates around the world, but to what extent? What lessons can law firms learn from this abrupt downturn after years of expansion both domestically and abroad? John P. Heinz’s article offers insights on the reasons of corporate law firms’ continuous expansion in the past decade and why their developmental strategies led to the failure of many firms in the financial crisis.

Large corporate law firms, despite their variations in areas of practice and professional expertise, follow similar strategies in their management. As Heinz points out, competition among law firms was heightened in the late 20^th century by ready access to comparative data concerning the business of the firms. As a result, “profits per partner” has become the single most important statistic in evaluating a law firm’s performance. Indeed, a law firm chairman even described it as “our stock price” (p. 69). Heinz argues that this unitary evaluation standard has led to risky strategies in recruiting/eliminating partners and diversifying practice areas, with the goal of getting a profits per partner “higher than the next firm’s” (p. 70). When the corporate law market was booming, firms often had enough profit margins to afford those risky strategies, such as focusing on high-value financial transactions work. But now, the negative consequences are clearly seen in many large law firms across the world.

The profits per partner rule not only influences the hiring and retention of equity partners, but also junior partners, associates, and paralegals – everyone in the firm. Another impressive (and even a bit scary) quote in the article is that, as a senior partner told the author, hiring more associates and paralegals was “like printing money” (p. 71). This is because a large number of associates per partner would increase the profits per partner, as the firm pays much less to these associates than it bills the clients. Accordingly, the size of corporate law firms kept increasing to hundreds and even thousands of lawyers. And, needless to say, now many of these associates have lost their jobs. In comparison to the well-known “tournament of lawyers” rule that Galanter and Palay proposed many years ago, the profits per partner rule seems to be even more powerful, as it connects the internal and external factors of corporate law practice.

A big push behind the profits per partner tournament, as Heinz repeatedly reminds us, were the high-priced consultants who advised law firms to increase their size, open more offices abroad, specialize in high-end financial transactions, and, more importantly, “jettison routine, high-volume, ‘commoditized’ work” (p. 67). The advice sounded quite rational, given the fact that the corporate market had been expanding worldwide in the past decade or two. The problem, however, is that economic rationality only works when the economy itself is functioning well. Therefore, it is not surprising that the advices given by these consultants became much more ambiguous after the financial crisis – they told law firms to “be more efficient,” “work smarter,” and “seek to reduce costs creatively” (p. 78).

Heinz is deeply skeptical of this advice, but he does not provide any concrete alternatives. Indeed, who can? Corporate law firms are highly dependent on the corporate market to survive and make money, so when the market is in disorder, firms have few choices to maintain a good performance. Yet the vast majority of law firms are (painfully) surviving the crisis, and there are still lessons for the survivors to learn from this short article. Above all, it shows the importance of diversity for law firms, not only in terms of personnel or business, but also in terms of developmental strategies. There is no single rule of law firm growth or management, be it tournament of partnership, or profits per partner. The strength and beauty of the legal profession lie precisely in its large variety of expertise and organizational forms, even for the corporate sector which has often been regarded as the least diversified.

In addition, Heinz suggests that the excessive use of comparative statistics across firms could be toxic to law firms seeking advantages in fierce market competition. The organizational theorists, particularly the neo-institutionalists in the 1970-80s, tell us that firms in each field would become similar over time as they imitate each other’s structures and best practices, voluntarily or by coercion. But they also indicate that the isomorphic structure could become an “iron cage” for these firms – it binds them rather than liberates them. The rise and fall of the corporate law market since the late 20^th century offers a great example of this process, and we are still witnessing the power of its “iron cage,” characterized by the wide use of comparative statistics and business consultants in law firm management. After the burst of the financial bubbles, hopefully firms can think more about the law, not business, when they try to manage a thousand lawyers.

Carole Silver

In the 1970s, during the rise of what was then known as the women’s movement, one popular T-shirt proclaimed: “I haven’t come a long way, and I’m not a baby.” It was a clever riposte to a high-profile cigarette ad campaign of the era that linked smoking and feminism. That T-shirt slogan is one that female lawyers at large firms today might want to adopt as their own.¹

In his new article, Eli Wald sheds light on why women in BigLaw have not yet come “a long way.”  He explains that large law firms have adopted a professional ideology of hypercompetitiveness, which has transformed the firms into sites where the opportunity to pursue a balanced life is, by definition, completely absent.  This is “bad news for women lawyers and for the prospect of greater gender equality in the legal profession.”² (P. 2287).  In fact, it’s bad news for everyone:  according to Joyce Sterling and Nancy Reichman, in the same symposium, “the long hours are taking their toll on male associates as well,” which is confirmed also by Dau-Schmidt et al in the Michigan alumni study.

Wald explains that the transformation relates not only to a change in the content of the professional ideology itself, but also to the shift from the ideology being one relating to individual lawyers to it being about firms.  He chronicles the development of professional ideology beginning with the Cravath firm, from “WASP ‘meritocracy,’” through “competitive meritocracy,” and to today’s hypercompetitiveness.   Hypercompetitiveness is used to justify the long hours and high pay characteristic of BigLaw: “it portrayed lawyers as near-heroic servants, zealous service providers who pursue the interests of their clients around the clock.  Under this new ideology, working 24/7 was considered a badge of honor, proof that lawyers were truly committed to client-centered service.” (P. 2271).  Here’s the rub: “’Ideal’ candidates [must] not only … meet merit credentials but also … be willing to sacrifice personal lives, indeed to allow their professional identity to overtake and consume their personal identity.” (P. 2272).

The interaction between hypercompetitive ideology and gender stereotypes raises presumptions against women’s ability to navigate paths to advancement in BigLaw.  This means that even the adoption of flexible and part-time work arrangements is a doomed strategy, because it highlights the identification of lawyers who take advantage of these programs as lacking  the “total devotion and utmost loyalty to the firm and its clients.” (P. 2286).  That is, without changing both underlying ideology and stereotypes, most adjustments to firm structure and policies are unlikely to lend real support to individual BigLaw lawyers, much less women lawyers at the firms.  The tensions are borne out in the popular discussion of these issues on a nearly daily basis.  In a recent posting on TechnoLawyer Blog titled “BigLaw: Large Firms Are From Mars, Female Lawyers Are From Venus,” for example, the dilemmas of practicing lawyers were reported as perfectly in line with Wald’s analysis:  one lawyer who took advantage of a part-time program in order to spend more time with her infant son described that she “billed just as many hours, and was just as available to my colleagues and clients, as I had been before.  The only difference was that I was paid less.’”  In fact, partners at her firm “’were generally peevish at the notion that an associate might not be available 24/7’” – despite the firm’s part-time policy.

Wald is an astute analyst of BigLaw, and in this and earlier writing he highlights the interaction between individual lawyers and their firms as a mechanism for change as well as stability.  Unpacking the relationship of professional ideology to gender stereotypes illuminates the framework that perpetuates gender imbalance in BigLaw.  But within this framework, there also may be lessons to be learned by delving into distinctions of firms and their managers, e.g. Linda Hudson of BAE Systems,³ cities and practice specialties, and Supreme Court practice (comment of Virginia Sykes); these might reveal alternatives to the hypercompetitiveness ideology that so clearly characterizes BigLaw deal-lawyering in major financial centers.  I’d like to think that these alternatives (and the contexts in which they emerge) will compete for influence in generating the next iteration of professional ideology.

1. Emily Barker, Stuck in the Middle, Am. Law. (June 1, 2009). [↩]
2. See R. Dinovitzer, G. Plickert, R. Sandefur, and J. Sterling, After the JD II: Second Results from a National Study of Legal Careers (2009), at p.63, teasing out differences between men and women in equity and nonequity partnership positions, but finding that both men and women are leaving private law firms. [↩]
3. Linda Hudson said on leadership:

   In those early years, I was often told and treated like I didn’t count, I didn’t matter. I made more money than my husband, but they wouldn’t count my income. In the workplace, there were no laws at the time to protect women from sexual harassment. There were all kinds of evil and ugly things that happened in the workplace, and there was nothing you could do but find a way to cope and to find a way to make things happen.  I think it’s those kinds of things that formed not only the person I was in my 20s, but also set the stage for the person I am today. I know what it’s like to be mistreated. I know what it’s like to be discriminated against. I know what it’s like to feel like you’re invisible in a room, and I know what it’s like to have to find the skills to cope with that and still do well and still succeed and not let it defeat you. I think, in large part, that’s defined who I am and how I do things. And in many ways it has given me an ability to deal with people that’s more inclusive and more empathetic.

   [↩]

Andrew Boon

Legal professionalism is prophesied an apocalypse with increasing frequency. The territory covered by The End of Lawyers? is the threat posed by IT.

Susskind’s big idea is that technology will create a future where lawyers are not the dominant interface between citizens and the law. Acting as a consultant to law firms on IT has confirmed his view that they suffer from conservatism, hostility to innovation and resistance to information technology. He chaired the UK Advisory Panel on Public Sector Information, currently sponsored by the Ministry of Justice, and remains the IT adviser to the Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales. His ideas are glimpsed in the directions that the UK government has taken since Susskind’s 1996 bestseller, The Future of Law. One of his   predictions, online legal communities–cross between Facebook and Wikipedia–sponsored by government surfaced in the Community Legal Service. His ideas have more traction in the UK, but are as transportable as the technology around which they are woven.

My engagement flows from interest in the future of the legal profession and specifically for professional ethics, now, belatedly, a candidate for inclusion in the mandatory curriculum of UK law degrees. What it might look like in 10 years’ time–what lawyers ought to do or what they must do under business-like regulation?

The End of Lawyers? puts more flesh on Susskind’s earlier predictions. The thesis is that legal services have traditionally been conceived as bespoke services, but IT creates the potential for them to pass through stages of standardization, systemization, packaging, and commoditization. Lawyers are reluctant to embrace the full potential of IT, but are powerless to resist the impact of disruptive legal technologies (document assembly, online dispute resolution).  They are forced to change how they handle legal work, utilizing outsourcing and off-shoring. Clients will eschew bespoke services, demanding more efficient, less costly points on the continuum to commoditization. Lawyers will pay more attention to recognition (of the need for legal advice), selection (of the source of legal advice) and service (the process of delivering legal advice and assistance), and IT will optimize each of these stages.

According to Susskind, there will be five types of lawyer in the future. Only “expert trusted advisers”  continue to handcraft legal solutions, but their work is a luxury  clients will not pay for, and numbers are reduced. “Enhanced practitioners” will support the delivery of the standard and commoditized packages produced by “legal knowledge engineers”.  “Legal risk managers” are counselors who avoid legal problems and “legal hybrids”, schooled in complementary disciplines aligned to law, project managers, strategy consultants, etc., will emerge. The rest had better look out!

The title is an attention grabber, but no lawyer is exempted from his prognosis, even large firm and in-house lawyers, recent high-prestige, high-growth sectors. The current model of Big Law, where partners’ profits are leveraged by large numbers of associates, will be less viable. Custom work demands fully-fledged expertise. The drift to commoditization will exempt relatively few. Bizarrely, only barristers, one of the groups of lawyers in the UK regarded as most threatened by market developments, are secure because they offer consultancy and advocacy. Thus, Susskind is a little ambiguous on whether the end of lawyers is avoidable, but lawyers who offer routine services and resist rationalization will end.

Commoditization is represented by “…an online solution that is made available for direct use by the end user, often on a DIY basis” (32). Online guidance enabling less qualified persons to offer lawyerly advice is hardly the end of lawyers. Despite the wider availability of legal material, the public still needs interpretation and guidance through the “legal maze”. And what of the disruptive technologies? Will they really force lawyers to embrace IT? Experience suggests that only compulsion ensures transition to a computerised function. Consider electronic filing of claims. Change will only become embedded once firms are required to adopt particular systems for optimal engagement with courts.

What about impact on stakeholders in the legal services market? Susskind argues that law students must be encouraged to consider these “likely trends and to think deeply about the new skills that will be needed in practice” (277).  In-house lawyers, as gatekeepers for referral to law firms, should start to work together more in online, closed communities. Again, bizarrely, Susskind exempts US law firms by suggesting that UK firms have stronger records of technological innovation than US practices, where “a group of millionaires with clear sight of retirement” (280) innovate only to avoid competitive disadvantage.  These robber barons will “wring every last cent out of the increasingly unsustainable practice of hourly billing and steer well clear of innovative IT. Unless, of course, clients demand otherwise” (281).

There are underlying reasons for differences between the two countries. In England and Wales, government is breaking the legal profession’s capacity to resist change, and could be seen to be dismantling legal professionalism. At the very least the creation of a Legal Services Board to oversee the profession is a nail through the heart of self-regulation. The Board will permit “Alternative Business Structures”, which can see legal services being delivered even by supermarkets. Susskind allows the possibility of non-lawyers contributing capital to law firms spurring the technological legal revolution. He speculates that investors will be less chary of IT and will invest in the kinds of systems that law firms do not currently exploit. This will reconfigure law firms, with lay managers and capital puncturing collegial structures.

A criticism of Susskind’s book (not the thesis) is that he erects a straw man in lawyers who assert “computers cannot replace legal work” (274). The truth is that most enterprises adopt technology ahead of the time they need it, so avoiding damage, much less fatality. Lawyers are probably as open-minded about anything that benefits their business. Susskind himself predicts an “incremental revolution [where] lawyers and their clients will change their ways in significant steps rather than huge leaps…” (274). Not the end of lawyers then?

Susskind’s vision focuses attention on unpleasant possibilities for lawyers and academics. It clears the mind of “what is” and encourages thought about the future of law, legal services, and legal education. Some futures are very likely, for example, new investors in law whether or not they splash money on lawyer-replacing technology. They will view legal professionalism and the “professional overhead” from experience of their own industries, wondering whether costs, from courses to apprenticeships to partnerships, are necessary. As insiders they will have to be taken seriously, often with unpredictable and unpalatable results.

John Flood

Law is parochial yet it plays a considerable role in globalization. With few exceptions legal education has continued listing towards the local away from the global. Harry Arthurs, along with Carole Silver and Margaret Thornton, is one of the few scholars to investigate globalization and legal education. Arthurs has spent many years thinking about legal education as befits one who has been both Dean of Osgoode Hall Law School and President of York University in Canada and written one of the major reports on legal education. (See Julian Webb’s reflections on the 1983 “Arthurs’ Report”.)

The starting point is that political economy has profound influences on the shaping of legal education via the research agendas of legal academics, types of jobs available for graduates, regulatory structures created by government, licensing of law schools, etc. As economies and legal markets adapt to globalization so does the knowledge it is perceived to need. Law schools like to promote themselves as global either in their names—Jindal Global Law School—or in their courses and faculty.

According to Arthurs there is a deeper level to this: globalization of the mind, which has become an ideology. It infuses our thinking where the transnational trumps the national, markets trump politics and law’s role is to make the world safe for markets. This is the “new normal” and it has consequences. The rule of law is seen to protect economic interests from the state; states will be seen to be of less influence than transnational institutions; local resentments consolidate in supranational bodies like the EU or devolution as in Spain or Canada; and the law is decoupled from the state and the state is decentered. Arthurs foresees a new curriculum which contains not judicial decisions but arbitration awards, not legislation but corporate codes of conduct.

Does legal education have to be this pessimistic? Not according to Arthurs. His example of a successful future legal education is found at McGill Law School in Montreal. McGill has developed a “polyjural or transsystemic” curriculum. The result is that

“individual courses and the curriculum as a whole consciously integrate civil and common law perspectives, domestic and international perspectives, the perspectives of state law and of non-state legal systems, and legal perspectives with those of other disciplines” (at 636).

A former McGill dean said “McGill has always been habited by the conviction that a great deal can be gained…from a sustained and humble dialogue with otherness.” And Jukier, a McGill law professor, notes that the idea of otherness is not to be the same but, through the freeing of law from jurisdiction or systemic boundaries, perspectives multiply and understanding is increased. She contrasts this approach with Justice Scalia’s disdain for foreign cases as meaningless dicta (Lawrence v. Texas, 539 U.S. 558 (2003)). Thus, for McGill, law is unbounded, legal systems interpenetrate or meet resistance, common law is mixed with civil and religious, domestic and international law struggle with each other, and law is found in transactions, discourse, and the quotidian routines of life.

Arthurs argues that such a curriculum is refreshing for legal scholars but how do students fare on such a diet? Since McGill favors unpredictability, students might balk, so let them have what they want. Arthurs says this isn’t so far from what law teachers already do as Scalia indicates. He prefers the approach of niche marketing, however, whereby the law school should try to attract those students who will feel most comfortable in the transsystemic environment. But it presupposes adequate knowledge on the part of the students to make an informed choice. Arthurs’s favored way is “to engage students in serious conversations which will free them from the tyranny of rules.” It has three principles. One is that students’ own experiences have validity in legal studies. Two is that faculty have to show they value questions more than answers. Three is for students to use their new knowledge to interrogate themselves. And four is to help students understand that their lives will be riven by ambiguity, indeterminacy, and irony.

This is a brave approach for a law school to take. And it challenges the faculty’s preconceptions as much as those of the students. Harry Arthurs is raising the stakes for law schools in that many wish to embrace globalization in some way but don’t necessarily know which is the best approach. Constrained by professional regulation, they might ignore it or introduce one or two courses, or they might reconstitute the entire curriculum as a challenge to conventional wisdom. Perhaps the last great revolution in legal education occurred in 1870 when Christopher Columbus Langdell became dean of Harvard Law School, in which case the next one is overdue.

Richard Parnham

I have a personal reason for reviewing Laurel S. Terry’s account of the European Commission’s recent investigation into the European professional services market. As a former senior writer on The European Lawyer magazine, I was a first-hand witness to many of the events described in her paper, including the 2003 Brussels conference she mentions.

The main purposes of Professor Terry’s paper is to describe an ongoing EU initiative, which has the stated aim of making Europe’s professions– including its legal professions–more efficient and competitive. In all likelihood, the end result of the events described in Terry’s paper will be that many of Europe’s bar associations will be forced to liberalize their regulatory frameworks. What is more, she believes that, in an increasingly globalized world, other countries may decide to follow Europe’s lead. She fears such countries may decide to conduct their own investigations into their professional services markets, using a similar methodology to that employed by the EU.

Terry’s article will undoubtedly produce a polarized response from those interested in lawyers’ professionalism in general, and lawyers’ deontology (ethical rule-making) in particular. Those who believe that the professions’ freedom to set its own deontological/ethical standards protects the “public interest,” or serves the administration of justice, may well be appalled to learn of the European Commission’s broad-brush, antitrust-focused appraisal of the European professional services market. Conversely, those who take a more skeptical view of lawyers’ self-regulation may well have their views that bar associations “don’t get” public (as opposed to private)-interest deontological rule-making confirmed.

Terry also highlights the Janus-like positioning by various EU institutions in relation to professional services regulation. As she points out, “traditionally, legal practice in the EU has been regulated by each EU state.” This point is reinforced in her commentary of the Wouters and Arduino ECJ rulings, two remarkable cases from the same day in 2002 which–effectively–allowed EU bars to get away with clearly anti-competitive bar rules, mainly because the Dutch and Italian governments, respectively, had decided that such rules were acceptable.

Yet, as Professor Terry points out, within months of Wouters and Arduino, another branch of the EU–the European Commission–effectively kick-started a multifaceted programme of reform of lawyers’ profession rules. An important milestone in this initiative was the publication of a much-criticized comparative, multistate report into European professional services regulation, produced by Austria’s Institut für Höhere Studien (IHS). In addition, a new Services Directive (only briefly mentioned in Terry’s report) was introduced and, after much debate, eventually passed.

Although many of the events covered in Terry’s article are now several years old, it is important that readers do not treat it as an interesting–if historical–account of a period of regulatory upheaval. Instead, her report is a snapshot of a series of events, which are even now developing. Yet, the very fact that she is describing an ongoing process invariably poses its own problems. Since Professor Terry completed her review, a new report into the legal profession has been unveiled in France, which may well have far-reaching implications, not only for the French legal profession, but also for the European legal market as a whole. A quick Google translation-powered search around various EU justice ministry and competition authority press release sections suggests a wealth of ongoing activity. Even developments Terry highlights in her report, such as the 2006 Irish Competition Authority investigation, have moved on before her paper has been published–albeit by “moved on,” I mean various spokespersons from the Irish Competition Authority have repeatedly complained about the failure of various stakeholders to “take on board” many of the Authority’s suggested reform proposals.

As a US-based commentator, Professor Terry expresses a hope that US legal regulatory and professional bodies should proactively investigate their own regulatory arrangements, rather than passively react to any equivalent “stock-taking” exercise by the US government. This is certainly a wise suggestion. Historically, legal professions have struck what is known as a “regulatory bargain” with their governments: bars issued and enforced deontological rules “in the public interest”, in return for regulatory autonomy. But if bars choose to ignore their side of the bargain, and refuse to engage in timely and necessary reforms to their rules, they arguably only have themselves to blame if governments react by curtailing their right to regulate.

And, as Terry rightly says, even before this latest European initiative, a series of EU directives had placed limited on EU bars’ deontological rule-making capacity, on issues as varied as establishment, advertising and lawyers’ money laundering disclosure obligations. In effect, EU bars’ competence to self-regulate are being salami-sliced, year-by-year. Even if US frontline regulators manage to avoid an EU-style comprehensive review of their ethical codes, Terry foresees the possibility of enhanced federal oversight of the US legal market.

In concluding her paper, Professor Terry says that, despite her support for the EU’s overall objectives, she feels that any equivalent US investigation should learn lessons from Europe. In particular, she hopes the methodology of regulatory analysis would be more robust–and open to criticism–than that carried out by the IHS. She also calls for greater recognition to be given for the “non-economic” aspects of lawyers’ profession regulation.

This, of course, is paradox that countless academics have pondered for many years. Many of lawyers’ deontological rules are justified by reference to esoteric concepts as “the rule of law.” But, as Terry admits, in arguing on a “rule of law” basis “one may not always be able to offer hard data or offer quantifiable measures in support of the arguments.” Yet, if the main justification for an existing deontological rule is fundamentally  intangible, how does one accurately assess whether that rule is objectively justified?

John Flood and Tanina Rostain

As legal profession scholars have observed, law practice is being reinvented at an ever-accelerating speed the world over.  Legal services are being routinized, commoditized, outsourced, disaggregated, reassembled, computerized, and unbundled—among associates, law firm partners, solo practitioners, contract lawyers, paralegals, law consultants, temporary law workers, websites, and online shared platforms.  In the corporate realm, multinational companies demand that their lawyers be available to provide services 24/7 in every corner of the globe.  In the meantime, lawyers representing individuals, non-profits, and NGOs increasingly use new technologies and transnational resources and strategies to develop more effective and efficient models of service delivery.  Despite this rapid pace of change, many lawyer regulatory regimes lag behind and continue to hew to a model of regulation tied to geographical jurisdiction and domestic legal norms.

In recent years, the field of the legal profession has benefitted from a proliferation of research by scholars seeking to understand the many changing dimensions of the legal profession.  Researchers have drawn on a broad range of social science disciplines, methodological approaches, and multilingual proficiencies to investigate legal practice(s) in a wide variety of geographic settings.

We highlight three aspects of the legal profession that have received attention. First, there has been work on the composition and geographical dispersion of law firms. Examples of the former include, in the US, Marc Galanter and Bill Henderson’s revision of tournament theory as the “elastic tournament”, which can be contrasted with David Wilkins and Mitu Gulati’s reconception of law firm internal labor markets. The geography of the legal profession, both in terms of globalization and styles of professionalism has been a growing field led by Jonathon Beaverstock, Daniel Muzio, Peter Taylor and James Faulconbridge in the UK.

Second, there is a growing body of literature on what lawyers actually do and the ways in which legal services are delivered. Robert Rosen has argued that “we’re all consultants now” as clients motivate lawyers to alter their organizational strategies. Sigrid Quack in Germany has researched on transnational law-making by lawyers. John Flood and Fabian Sosa unpicked the role international lawyers play in transnational business transactions showing their activities were very much a function of the type of law firm with which they associated. Tanina Rostain examined the role of the tax bar in the market for abusive tax shelters and its subtle interpretation of professionalism and gatekeeping.  At the other end of the spectrum Sida Liu has described the coping strategies of criminal defense lawyers in China in the face of powerful state opposition, something alien to lawyers in the West.

Third, the field of regulation of lawyers has moved beyond the analysis of lawyers’ ethics traditionally found in the legal journals, i.e. the individual lawyer’s behavior. In countries such as Australia law firms have the power now to incorporate and list themselves on the stock exchange. In the UK in 2011 non-lawyers (e.g. supermarkets; insurance companies) will be able to own law firms. This raises questions over law firms’ ethical responsibility in the face of commercial pressures that appear to conflict with the norms of professionalism as Christine Parker has studied in Australia. Andrew Boon has even asked if we are seeing the globalization of legal ethics. And Laurel Terry has shown how the legal profession is being impacted by the regulatory might of the WTO and GATS. Lawyers and the legal profession are no longer immune from the forces of modernization and globalization.

Given this wealth, this space offers an opportunity to initiate an ongoing discussion about the most interesting work and make it available to a wider audience of legal scholars.   With these ends in mind, we have recruited leading scholars from around the world to showcase their favorite exemplars of recent research on lawyers, the legal profession, and lawyer regulation.  Contributing editors have been invited to use this platform to highlight the most significant developments in the field and provide access — for researchers mainly working inside the Anglo-American legal tradition — to important work not readily available in English.   Our hope is that this section will contribute to the growing global conversations about lawyers’ ideals and lawyers’ practices.

Section Editors

The Section Editors choose the Contributing Editors and exercise editorial control over their section.  In addition, each Section Editor will write at least one contribution (”jot”) per year.  Questions about contributing to a section ought usually to be addressed to the section editors.

Professor John Flood
University of Westminster School of Law

Professor Tanina Rostain
Co-director of the Center for Professional Values and Practice at New York Law School

Contributing Editors

Contributing Editors agree to write at least one jot for Jotwell each year.

Professor Andy Boon
Dean of the University of Westminster School of Law

Professor Elizabeth Chambliss
Co-Director of the Center for Professional Values and Practice at New York Law School

Dr.  Kay-Wah Chan
Macquarie University, Department of Business Law

Professor Susan Saab Fortney
Paul Whitfield Horn Professor of Law Associate Dean for Research and Faculty Development, Texas Tech University School of Law

Professor Sida Liu
University of Wisconsin-Madison

Richard Parnham
Legal Journalist

Professor Christine Parker
Associate Professor and Reader in the Law Faculty at University of Melbourne

Professor Carole Silver
Visiting Professor of Law; Executive Director, Center for the Study of the Legal Profession, Georgetown University Law Center

Professor Laurel S. Terry
Harvey A. Feldman Distinguished Faculty Scholar and Professor of Law, Penn State Dickinson School of Law

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Contributors should email their article, in plain text, in HTML, or in a common wordprocessor format (Open Office, WordPerfect, or Word) to ed.jotwell@gmail.com and we will forward the article to the appropriate Section Editors. Or you may, if you prefer, contact the appropriate Section Editors directly.

The Journal of Things We Like (Lots)–JOTWELL–invites you to join us in filling a telling gap in legal scholarship by creating a space where legal academics will go to identify, celebrate, and discuss the best new legal scholarship. Currently there are about 350 law reviews in North America, not to mention relevant journals in related disciplines, foreign publications, and new online pre-print services such as SSRN and BePress. Never in legal publishing have so many written so much, and never has it been harder to figure out what to read, both inside and especially outside one’s own specialization. Perhaps if legal academics were more given to writing (and valuing) review essays, this problem would be less serious. But that is not, in the main, our style.

We in the legal academy value originality. We celebrate the new. And, whether we admit it or not, we also value incisiveness. An essay deconstructing, distinguishing, or even dismembering another’s theory is much more likely to be published, not to mention valued, than one which focuses mainly on praising the work of others. Books may be reviewed, but articles are responded to; and any writer of a response understands that his job is to do more than simply agree.

Most of us are able to keep abreast of our fields, but it is increasingly hard to know what we should be reading in related areas. It is nearly impossible to situate oneself in other fields that may be of interest but cannot be the major focus of our attention.

A small number of major law journals once served as the gatekeepers of legitimacy and, in so doing, signaled what was important. To be published in Harvard or Yale or other comparable journals was to enjoy an imprimatur that commanded attention; to read, or at least scan, those journals was due diligence that one was keeping up with developments in legal thinking and theory. The elite journals still have importance – something in Harvard is likely to get it and its author noticed. However, a focus on those few most-cited journals alone was never enough, and it certainly is not adequate today. Great articles appear in relatively obscure places. (And odd things sometimes find their way into major journals.) Plus, legal publishing has been both fragmented and democratized: specialty journals, faculty peer reviewed journals, interdisciplinary journals, all now play important roles in the intellectual ecology.

The Michigan Law Review publishes a useful annual review of new law books, but there’s nothing comparable for legal articles, some of which are almost as long as books (or are future books). Today, new intermediaries, notably subject-oriented legal blogs, provide useful if sometimes erratic notices and observations regarding the very latest scholarship. But there’s still a gap: other than asking the right person, there’s no easy and obvious way to find out what’s new, important, and interesting in most areas of the law.

Jotwell will help fill that gap. We will not be afraid to be laudatory, nor will we give points for scoring them. Rather, we will challenge ourselves and our colleagues to share their wisdom and be generous with their praise. We will be positive without apology.

Tell us what we ought to read!

How It Works

Jotwell will be organized in sections, each reflecting a subject area of legal specialization. Each section, with its own url of the form sectionname.jotwell.com, will be managed by a pair of Section Editors who will have independent editorial control over that section. The Section Editors will also be responsible for selecting a team of ten or more Contributing Editors. Each of these editors will commit to writing at least one Jotwell essay of 500-1000 words per year in which they identify and explain the significance of one or more significant recent works – preferably an article accessible online, but we won’t be doctrinaire about it. Our aim is to have at least one contribution appear in each section on a fixed day every month, although we won’t object to more. Section Editors will also be responsible for approving unsolicited essays for publication. Our initial sections will cover administrative law, constitutional law, corporate law, criminal law, cyberlaw, intellectual property law, legal profession, and tax law — and we intend to add new sections when there is interest in doing so.

For the legal omnivore, the ‘front page’ at Jotwell.com will contain the first part of every essay appearing elsewhere on the site. Links will take you to the full version in the individual sections. There, articles will be open to comments from readers.

The Details

Learn more about Jotwell:

• Style guide
• Acceptable use policy
• Copyright Policy
• Privacy policy