The End of the Tournament? The Re-Organization and Re-Professionalization of Large Law Firms in the 21st Century

(Skyscraper farms--the new law firm?)

I am writing an article for a sociology journal (hence the phraseology below) on large law firms in the 21st century. Here's the abstract and any comments will be most welcome.

Law has traditionally seen itself as unique among the professions in that it has been able to invoke notions of the “public interest” to articulate and to protect professional boundaries. With the rise of the large transnational law firm (LTLF) a conflict between the discourses of professionalism and organization has emerged. With the LTLF’s main orientation towards the market with its ideals of flexibility, mobility, and transparency organization appears to have overtaken the professional ethos. Yet, LTLFs have begun to reshape professionalism from within the organization by invoking new concepts of the meaning of profession. By re-engineering education and training and revisiting ethical compliance, for example, law firms are creating new ideas and professional boundaries which supersede those established by lawyers’
professional associations. LTLFs have formed alliances with other professional organizations, eg, investment banks and accounting firms, to augment their power and authority.

The new professional-organizational ethos is altering accepted notions of career (tournament), ethics/deontology (now conflicts of interest) and governance (transnational managerialism). This can be seen as a reflection of the state’s increasing role in interpreting organizations’ environments as well as LTLFs’ ability (and that of law) to shape the nature of the state’s acknowledgement of the profession’s claims. Moreover, these manoeuvres are bleeding over into the
professional mainstream beyond the large law firms. The organization itself has become a professional actor co-equal with the professional. These disruptions and reinterpretations are analyzed within a normative and discursive institutional context using a combination of historical and comparative data. They show a recursiveness between ideas of professionalism in the 19th and 21st centuries which suggest the era of post-professionalism is yet to be achieved.

Legal Services Act Breeds New Lawyers

(Thanks to New Yorker)

Promoting and Protecting Human Rights in the UK

(Thanks to PSU)

The Westminster International Law and Theory Centre, and the Student Law Society are holding a public seminar on promoting and protecting human rights in the UK.

Thursday 10 December 2009: 1400-1700.

School of Law, Room 3.07, 4 Little Titchfield St, London W1W 7UW

Attendance is free but spaces are limited. Book yours by emailing:
e.mcclean@westminster.ac.uk

The current lineup of speakers includes:

Michael Willis MP, Justice Minister




Andrew Dismore MP, Chairman of the Joint Committee on Human Rights





Prof Francesca Klug, LSE, and former Commission of the Equality and Human Rights Commission




Roger Smith, Director of Justice








Questions and Answers afterwards.

Reclaiming Professional Identity

(Thanks to Don Marquis-1933)

Lawyers are worrying about the potential effects of "Tesco Law" when it hits the streets in 2011. Some have predicted that more than 1,000 law firms might be extinguished.

One other impact, not normally talked about, will be the loss of professional identity or, worse, status. There's no doubt we will see deprofessionalization occur. But does it matter? Is professional identity nought but a chimera? Should we shrug our shoulders and say, "wotthehell, archy, toujours gai".

It's important because of a report issued on the fate of Baby Peter who died while under the supervision of Haringey social services department. Social work failed in frontline services and their management.

So what was to be the fate of social work? It's always been one of those categories which some theorists have argued could be a profession or at best a semi-profession. The British government appointed a Social Work Task Force to answer this. Its report was published today.

It recommends

a call for a reformed system of initial training, together with greater leadership and a strong national voice for the social work profession, led by a college of social work. The report also calls for a single, nationally recognised career structure and a system for forecasting levels of demand for social workers, coupled with clear and binding standards for employers in how frontline social work should be resourced, managed and supported. The Task Force has also recommended a licence to practise system for social workers to acquire and keep up their professional status. In addition to this, improved understanding among the general public, service users, other professionals and the media about the role and purpose of social work, the demands of the job and the contribution social workers make, will be crucial in raising and securing the status of the profession for the future.

As one social worker said on the Today programme: "It's time to raise the profile of social work and reclaim professional identity."

One of the suggestion is to create a Royal College of Social Work like the Royal College of Surgeons. So will it be possible to (re-)create a profession through these measures? There's something manufactured about them that makes me feel very uncertain.

When we look at the histories of professions, their existence seems to be one of tension and struggle with the state. Are they monopolies? Are their practices in the public interest? Do they extract rents? Should they self-regulate?

The answer of the British state is to deprofessionalize and externally regulate where it can--doctors, accountants, university teachers. In this respect lawyers are the last of the tribe to be taken on. And in the case of the Legal Services Act 2007, they didn't realise what hit them. Many still don't.

I don't hold much hope for social workers. But it would pay lawyers to take a moment and look at what has happened to social work and its members. It's very easy to slide down the professional pole; but it is exceedingly hard to climb it.

So let me close with another of archy's maxims, which lawyers might take comfort in:

if you get gloomy just
take an hour off and sit
and think how
much better this world
is than hell
of course it won t cheer
you up much if
you expect to go there

New Blog...

(Ok, if you don't know who this is it's Doctor Who)

In the very near future I will be moving my blog to a new home over at my website, www.johnflood.com. My web designer, Caroline Mockett, is making some changes to the layout before the final change occurs.

The blog will be at www.johnflood.com/blog/. It's my opportunity to put most of my virtual life in one place.

It's based on Wordpress so there is a new technology to get used to. And I will be scratching my head just like the good doctor above. For a while I will run both the new one and Blogger simultaneously until I decide to switch off the old one.

I'm quite nervous about doing this. I've become used to Blogger and although at times it's slow and clunky, it's like an old friend. So I shall be like Doctor Who and jump in my cyberspace TARDIS and set off for new dimensions....sort of....

Transforming Justice in the UK after 60 Years

This coming week I shall be in Portugal at a conference on the transformation on access to law and justice. I am giving a paper on the situation in the UK. The paper is available at johnflood.com or SSRN.

The abstract says:

It is the 60th birthday of legal aid in the UK. The question asked in this paper is: has legal aid reached the end of its life or is it about to enter a new "third age"? The UK has the highest spend on legal aid of any country in the world, running to over £2 billion a year. The vast majority of this goes on criminal legal aid of which a considerable portion pays for very high cost criminal cases. Civil legal aid is the rump receiving whatever is left over after criminal work has been paid for.

Over the last 60 years legal aid has gone from near universal coverage to a very limited range of work which is now mostly taken up with family and welfare aid. Means and merits tests exclude most people from accessing legal aid.

The supplement/replacement to legal aid has come from the insurance industry with After the Event and Before the Event insurance policies guaranteeing some access to law and justice. Third party litigation funding is also gathering force.

The largest component, however, of civil justice in the modern era is in auxillary forms of justice, most notably in the rise of complaints procedures and ombudsmen. In the example used in the paper, the Financial Ombudsman Service, is ranked as the busiest adjudicator in the country dealing with over 700,000 complaints a year.

Legal aid has been shrunk by government and has now become part of a mixed model of the delivery of legal services. Whether this will be sufficient to fight Beveridge's five ‘Giant Evils’ of Want (poverty), Disease, Ignorance, Squalor and Idleness (unemployment) is still an open question.

Shaking Up the Legal Profession

(you know what this is...)

Whether the legal profession in the UK is screaming for pleasure or because of the agonizing pain is open to interpretation after two announcements today.

The Legal Services Board announced and published its consultation paper on alternative business structures, titled, Alternative Business Structures: Approaches to Licensing. It's 113 pages long so I haven't read it yet, but the summary says:

The paper proposes removing restrictions that have, until now, prevented non-lawyers from owning legal service businesses. The new rules will mean that lawyers will have new freedoms to provide their services alongside services from non-lawyers, and for existing legal practices to attract new external investment.

A robust framework of consumer protection, professional competence and commercial integrity is at the heart of proposals. The LSB is currently consulting on guidance to govern the licensing of these new models of service delivery. There are three key protections.

• a test to ensure that non-lawyer owners and managers of new forms of legal practice are fit and proper;

• the introduction of two new roles in every new firm: the Head of Legal Practice and Head of Finance and Administration who will ensure compliance with licence requirements;

• a widening of the complaints handling system to deal with complaints about firms that do not deliver legal services in isolation but instead offer these alongside other services (for example, financial services) whilst ensuring access to the Office for Legal Complaints.

The new framework aims to ensure that lawyers and non-lawyers alike have the commercial freedom to provide legal services to consumers in ways that harness commercial creativity, maximise business efficiencies, embed professional ethics and meet consumer demand.

It has the potential to allow consumers to access their legal services in a variety of new different ways, for example as a part of a 'one stop shop' with other professional services such as insurance, tax advice and accountancy, or through existing legal practices diversifying and developing with the benefit of external investment.

The guidance announced today sets out principles that new ‘licensing authorities’ will be expected to regulate in accordance with, anticipating that the first licences will be issued by mid 2011.

The responsibility for ensuring that current restrictions on individual lawyers preventing them from developing new forms of practice lies with the eight Approved Regulators overseen by the LSB.

The second piece of news concerns the Bar. Its regulator, the Bar Standards Board, has decided, apparently (decision due 19 November), to permit partnerships between barristers and with others. Frances Gibb of the TimesOnline reports:

Hundreds of years of tradition may be ditched today when the ban on barristers joining in partnership with other professionals is lifted.

The decision, to be taken at a public meeting by the Bar Standards Board, the profession’s regulator, has provoked furious controversy because key papers have not been released in advance.

At present barristers cannot form partnerships with each other or with solicitors, and neither can form partnerships with other professionals such as accountants or surveyors. The Legal Services Act paves the way for a complete shake-up in the legal market and sweeps away current restrictions.

Of course the problem with Munch's screamer was solved by its theft. But I don't think anyone is going to steal away the Legal Services Board or the Bar Standards Board just yet. Lawyers will have to adjust and it's not that difficult. The 21st arrived a while ago.

Don't Make Lists!

(Thanks to Craven's World)

I met with a friend, Christine Parker, from Australia today and we talked about research and writing. We have both been dealing with a particular British journal that thrives on having each article submitted reviewed by as many reviewers as possible--5 in my case and 6 in hers. It's not easy as I now have a further 3 reviewers on the revision.

The upshot was I decided to list what I had to do over the next several months. And I shouldn't have done it.

• Finish final revisions on my lawyer-client relationship article for a journal
  
• Finish draft of paper for conference in Portugal on "The transformation of access to justice in the UK"
• Finish chapter on "Professionalism and entrepreneurship: the case of the legal profession in England and Wales" with Daniel Muzio for Handbook of Research on Entrepreneurship in Professional Services
• Finish revising "Will there be fallout from Clementi? global repercussions for the legal profession after the Legal Services Act 2007" for a journal
• Plan paper on lawyers, clients, and billing for book on topic: book being edited by former student
• Consider invitation to contribute chapter, "Legal mechanisms: global, transnational or international?" to book on Capitalism and Capitalisms being edited by friend from another university
• Finish draft of new book on Barristers' Clerks
• Revise draft of book on globalization of law
• Plan panel and paper for legal ethics at Stanford next year and for conference at the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies in London next year
• Finish drafting paper on "Becoming a global lawyer" with Peter Lederer
• Think of contributing editors and plan future pieces for Jotwell.com
  
• Revise grant proposal with Reza Banakar on impact in legal scholarship
• Prepare grant proposal on legal ethics with four other colleagues on which I am lead PI
• Finish fieldwork interviews with Daniel Muzio on our "After Clementi/Legal Services Act" project, then prepare bigger research grant proposal
• There is a fellowship I saw that I should apply for
• Daniel and I have been thinking about setting up a seminar series
• I want to hibernate all winter long....

PS. I also met a very interesting lawyer today, Michael Scutt, who is one of the few who has grasped the full implications of the Legal Services Act and the impact of "Tesco Law".

Korea Adopts Clementi?

(Thanks to Libraryman)

According to the The Korea Herald (courtesy of American Lawyer) the government will introduce Clementi-style reforms to its legal profession.

The Korean Development Institute, a think tank, recommended that a number of professions be compelled to relax their restrictive practices, i.e. deregulate.

Among the measures promoted were investment by non-lawyers in law firms, and the removal of service barriers between lawyers and accountants and patent agents. We shall be seeing "Lotte Mart Law" (a major Korean supermarket as they don't have Tesco...) and other forms of multidisciplinary practices or should that be multi-chabol-practices?

Naturally the bar associations didn't greet this announcement with unalloyed glee. The Seoul Bar Association was quick off the mark with a snappy rejoinder:

The Seoul Bar Association released a statement, saying "a non-lawyer's ownership of a law firm will make law firms subordinate to market capital which undermines the fundamental legitimacy of the current lawyer licensing system."

And naturally I have been referring to South Korea not North. They probably don't have much use for lawyers up there yet.

(Thanks to Eric Lafforgue)