Rethinking Legal Careers Through the Lens of Relocation and Rerouting

Carole Silver

One of the most interesting findings of the After The JD project, which tracked the careers of a nationally-representative sample of US law school graduates who qualified as lawyers in the year 2000, was how many times they changed jobs.¹ Job changes can involve different positions with status implications, as well as differences around factors like flexibility and compensation. The After The JD authors analyzed each of these kinds of moves in the framework of a social capital analysis; among their findings was the role of the prestige associated with US News rankings of law schools and American Lawyer rankings of law firms in shaping moves and opportunities.²

In Sida Liu and Anson Au’s new article, Mobility Spaces: Geographical and Professional Distances in Career Mobility, the authors consider analogous questions about lateral moves of lawyers using a different lens—that of mobility spaces. They urge that “[t]he movement of professionals is shaped not only by their social and educational backgrounds but also by the geographical and professional distances between these mobility spaces.” (P. 196.) That is, they see career moves as conveying important information through the physical and social proximity of one position to the next. Further, rather than focusing on the US as did the After The JD project, their study is based in Hong Kong. They utilize data reporting the career moves of law firm partners working in Hong Kong between 1994 and 2021, culled from the official journal of the Law Society of Hong Kong. (P. 204.) The article thus speaks empirically of a particular time and place while aiming to contribute theoretically to “enhancing our understanding of the spatial dimensions in which professional careers evolve.” (P. 196.)

The concept of “mobility spaces” is not limited to the physical; it also includes “social…and legal spaces that professionals navigate while shaping their career trajectories over time.” (P. 196.) Legal spaces might be jurisdictional boundaries or regulatory frameworks about lawyer licensing, while social spaces “refer to the ecologies of work in which professionals practice and develop their careers.” (P. 198.) Spatial trajectories emphasize the process of navigating careers, paying “close attention to boundaries and distance between mobility spaces.” (P. 199.) Further, Liu and Au explore two “corresponding forms of career mobility: “relocation (geographic mobility) and rerouting (interprofessional mobility).” (P. 199, emphasis in original.)

The focus of the article is on partners who left law firms for other positions, either in law firms or other organizations. The data provided a sample of 1,035 lawyers involved in such moves over a 28 year period. To delve into relocation, the authors recorded geographical distance between the location of the job left (in Hong Kong) and the next job into four categories, moving from nearest to farthest: remaining in Hong Kong; moving to mainland China; to elsewhere in the Asia-Pacific region (including Australia and New Zealand); and to Western or other countries. For rerouting, they explored the difference between the position left (law firm partner) and the new position in terms of type of organization and substantive focus, using another four categories: remaining in a private law firm position; moving to an in-house position in a business organization; moving into a public interest or public service position; and pursuing a different career altogether, giving examples of politics or owning a (non-law firm) business. (P. 206.) Demographic information also was collected regarding basic characteristics of gender, “observed race”—meaning whether the lawyer was Asian or not—and age. (P. 205.) Liu and Au also classified the prestige of the law firm being left, and that firm’s geographic headquarters as well as its geographic scope in terms of offices in different countries; this allowed them to distinguish between Western, Hong Kong and China-based firms, as well as between elite and all other firms. Finally, they gathered information about the jurisdictions (specific, and overall number) in which the moving lawyers were admitted to practice.

Overall, just over half of the sample was Asian, nearly three-quarters male, and close to half left positions in law firms based in Hong Kong. (P. 209.)

In terms of relocation, Liu and Au found that the odds of moving farther away were significantly higher for non-Asians, and significantly lower for females. (P. 210.) At the same time, the odds of moving farther geographically also were significantly higher for lawyers moving from firms based outside of mainland China and Hong Kong. Unsurprisingly, more prestigious firms led to significantly higher odds of serving as a jumping off point for greater geographic distance. (P. 211.) Law firm prestige also mediated the differences for non-Asians and women in terms of geographical distance. (P. 211.)

The analysis of rerouting found that gender and race were significant determinants of distance. Men were more likely to remain in law compared to women, as were non-Asians compared to Asians. Further, the odds of moving to a public service or non-profit position were higher for women. (P. 214.)

Putting these analyses together, Liu and Au found that it was more likely for women to move into business or non-profit positions, and women also were less likely to move away from Hong Kong. They found that the opportunities of non-profit and public interest positions were essentially unavailable both to non-Asians and to individuals who were not local to Hong Kong. As Liu and Au explained,

“The advantages provided by foreign credentials and backgrounds to lawyers in the business sector largely turn into disadvantages for localized careers in public service and non-profits. This demonstrates that public service and non-profit sectors are predominantly closed off to non-locals, disproportionately excluding individuals of non-Asian races, non-local credentials, and foreign firm origins. Although professional distance can be an indicator of career flexibility and the pursuit of autonomy, it may also signify constraints faced by the marginalized.” (P. 215.)

Their analysis highlighted that being at a prestigious law firm increased the odds of leaving for another profession—in other words, the platform of prestige increases opportunities for mobility. (P. 217.)

I am curious about what might be hidden within the 28-year span of the data. This period included the reversion of Hong Kong to China in 1997, and the pandemic in 2020, among other events. Both of these had the potential to upend the sense of urgency about career moves, as well as opportunities that were shaped by the perception of Hong Kong’s importance in the global economy. The authors mention the pandemic’s destabilizing force in terms of changing expectations about presence (P. 196), among other things, but did not delve into how this might be reflected in the data, although, admittedly, ending in 2021 likely limits their ability to do a deep dive on pandemic-related issues.

At the same time, there is an undercurrent in the article that suggests the authors perceive greater distance as more prestigious for relocation purposes, but less for rerouting purposes. This is attributed to research on earning potential, among other things. (P. 201.) Still, given the increasing significance of public interest positions both in and outside of Hong Kong over the span of their data, including the period just after the 2008 financial crisis when competition over public interest positions reframed them in terms of prestige, I wish they had addressed these assumptions more directly.³

Writing about lawyer mobility with phrases like “seamless[] transitioning” to “boundaryless careers” seemed to speak to another age from where we sit at the moment. Still, even in the context of the constraint of global commerce and trade in legal services emblematic of the current agendas of national populism, this article is worth a close read; Liu and Au offer up a rich and layered analysis of “how…professionals navigate spatial distance in their career moves” and what this can tell us about persistent inequality in the legal profession. (P. 196.)

1. See Rebecca Sandefur and Robert L. Nelson, Mobility and Turnover, in After the JD III: Third Results of a National Study of Legal Careers (2014).
2. See Robert L. Nelson, Ronit Dinovitzer, Bryant G. Garth, Joyce S. Sterling, David B. Wilkins, Meghan Dawe & Ethan Michelson, The Making of Lawyers’ Careers (2023); Bryant G. Garth & Joyce S. Sterling, Diversity, Hierarchy, and Fit in Legal Careers: Insights from Fifteen Years of Qualitative Interviews, 31 Geo. J. Leg. Ethics 123 (2018).
3. Regarding the role of public interest in Hong Kong, see, e.g., Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom LLP & Affiliates, Asia Pacific Careers Guide, Archived 7 April 2014 at the Wayback Machine (2012), at p. 24 (highlighting importance in elite law firm); The University of Hong Kong, First Annual Hong Kong Public Interest Law Conference: Advancing Social Justice (January 15, 2014). For the role of public interest outside of Hong Kong, see, e.g., Rachel J. Littman, Finding the Silver Lining: The Recession and the Legal Employment Market, NY State Bar Assoc. Journal (Sept. 2009) 16, at p.17 (“Many public interest legal organizations are reaping the benefit of free legal help from deferred law firm associates, but they have limited resources to sufficiently train and utilize these new lawyers. Resentment is building not only among the entrenched public interest lawyers at these organizations as they try to figure out how to be yearlong repositories of BigLaw lawyers, but also among the deeply committed public interest law school students and graduates who have been working their entire careers to secure coveted public interest positions—the same positions that are now being taken by questionably prepared colleagues with funding at twice the average $44,000 starting salary.”(footnote omitted); Lisa Faye Petak, Young Lawyers Turn to Public Service, NYT (September 19, 2010) (“Some in the legal community perceive a sense of competition among recent graduates who were once on different career paths. “I think it is hard for those wholly committed to public interest to see their deferred friends getting jobs at great public interest organizations while they struggle to land their dream jobs,” said…the assistant dean at Harvard.”); Fact vs. Fiction: Public Interest Careers, Yale Law School (“Getting a permanent public interest job tends to be more challenging than getting a large firm job.“).