Lawyers and Clients

I am revising a paper I submitted a while ago to the Journal of Law and Society on lawyer-client relationships. The argument is that while we conventionally view lawyer-client relationships as a dyads, they are in fact more complex. This is especially so in relation to lawyers' clients who are borrowing money from banks to finance projects. (This of course sounds funny right now in the present economic circumstances, but there was a time when banks did lend money.)

So a better way of perceiving these relationships is to think of them as at bottom triadic or more likely multipolar. Lawyers are often placed in conflictual settings by having to satisfy multiple constituencies, some of whom are bigger repeat players than others.

This paper follows on from one I published a long time ago on the management of uncertainly in lawyers' work which was interpreted through the lens of the lawyer-client relationship. For the sake of continuity I have just put this paper up on SSRN.

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