Download or read book Structural Causes of Dissatisfaction Among Large firm Attorneys written by Deborah Holmes and published by . This book was released on 1988 with total page 138 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Happy Lawyer written by Nancy Levit and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2010-07-30 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: You get good grades in college, pay a small fortune to put yourself through law school, study hard to pass the bar exam, and finally land a high-paying job in a prestigious firm. You're happy, right? Not really. Oh, it beats laying asphalt, but after all your hard work, you expected more from your job. What gives? The Happy Lawyer examines the causes of dissatisfaction among lawyers, and then charts possible paths to happier and more fulfilling careers in law. Eschewing a one-size-fits-all approach, it shows how maximizing our chances for achieving happiness depends on understanding our own personality types, values, strengths, and interests. Covering everything from brain chemistry and the science of happiness to the workings of the modern law firm, Nancy Levit and Doug Linder provide invaluable insights for both aspiring and working lawyers. For law students, they offer surprising suggestions for selecting a law school that maximizes your long-term happiness prospects. For those about to embark on a legal career, they tell you what happiness research says about which potential jobs hold the most promise. For working lawyers, they offer a handy toolbox--a set of easily understandable steps--that can boost career happiness. Finally, for firm managers, they offer a range of approaches for remaking a firm into a more satisfying workplace. Read this book and you will know whether you are more likely to be a happy lawyer at age 30 or age 60, why you can tell a lot about a firm from looking at its walls and windows, whether a 10 percent raise or a new office with a view does more for your happiness, and whether the happiness prospects are better in large or small firms. No book can guarantee a happier career, but for lawyers of all ages and stripes, The Happy Lawyer may give you your best shot.
Download or read book Research Handbook on the Sociology of Law written by Jiří Přibáň and published by Edward Elgar Publishing. This book was released on 2020-12-25 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This unique Research Handbook maps the historical, theoretical, and methodological concepts in sociology of law, exploring the rich and complex nature of this area of research. It argues that sociology of law flourishes due to its strong capacity for interdisciplinary engagement and links to other scientific concepts, methodologies and research fields.
Download or read book The Law Firm and the Public Good written by Robert A. Katzmann and published by Brookings Institution Press. This book was released on 2010-12-01 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What can law firms do to ensure justice for all? How can they serve the needs of those unable to pay? How can law firms improve the quality of life for their lawyers? At a time when government support for legal aid is limited and under fire, when recent U.S. presidents have urged increased volunteerism, when the American Bar Association's Law Firm Pro Bono Challenge is under way, and when some within the legal profession have called for mandatory pro bono work, this new book examines these important questions. The Law Firm and the Public Good blends academic scholarship with real world experience as it brings together lawyers who have wrestled with the pressures of everyday practice. Concerned about deepening the commitment of large law firms to the wider community, the authors seek to provide a blueprint for firms concerned with creating, developing, implementing, and evaluating pro bono programs. Moving beyond the ethical arguments which justify a law firm's commitment to community service, the authors argue that pro bono work is in the firm's self-interest. They show that a heightened concern with the public good can improve a lawyer's spirit, sharpen lawyering skills, and enhance the humanistic traditions of law practice. They conclude that professional responsibility and self-interest support the same conclusion: that the law firm and the public good are inextricably linked and that each can draw strength from the other in ways that nourish both. The contributors are William A. Bradford, Jr., Hogan & Hartson; Senior Circuit Judge Frank M. Coffin, U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit; Anthony F. Earley, Jr., Detroit Edison; Marc Galanter, University of Wisconsin-Madison; Donald W. Hoagland, Davis, Graham & Stubbs; William C. Kelly, Jr., Latham & Watkins; Esther F. Lardent, director of the ABA's Law Firm Pro Bono Project; Edwin L. Noel, Armstrong, Teasdale, Schlafly & Davis; Thomas Palay, University of Wisconsin-Madison; J
Download or read book Partners with Power written by Robert L. Nelson and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2022-05-27 with total page 396 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1988.
Download or read book Attorneys Career Dissatisfaction in the New Normal written by Milan Markovic and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page 46 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The 2008 economic recession had a seismic impact on the legal profession. This Article is the first to empirically assess whether the recession has made law an unsatisfying career.Relying on survey data from over 11,000 active members of the State Bar of Texas, we find that only 13.5% of all attorneys and 11.5% of full-time attorneys are dissatisfied with their careers. Newer attorneys report greater career dissatisfaction than more experienced attorneys, yet they too are largely satisfied.We also determine using logistic regression that three factors are highly predictive of lawyers' career dissatisfaction: 1) comparatively low incomes; 2) working in private practice as opposed to in government or in a non-profit/public interest setting; and 3) law firm employment in a non-partnership role. Law school debt and lower class rank have only minor effects on career dissatisfaction whereas race, gender, years of practice experience, practice area, and firm size have no independent effects.
Download or read book How Lawyers Lose Their Way written by Jean Stefancic and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2005-01-13 with total page 153 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this penetrating book, Jean Stefancic and Richard Delgado use historical investigation and critical analysis to diagnose the cause of the pervasive unhappiness among practicing lawyers. Most previous writers have blamed the high rate of burnout, depression, divorce, and drug and alcohol dependency among these highly paid professionals on the narrow specialization, long hours, and intense pressures of modern legal practice. Stefancic and Delgado argue that these professional demands are only symptoms of a deeper problem: the way lawyers are taught to think and reason. They show how legal education and practice have been rendered arid and dull by formalism, a way of thinking that values precedent and doctrine above all, exalting consistency over ambiguity, rationality over emotion, and rules over social context and narrative. Stefancic and Delgado dramatize the plight of modern lawyers by exploring the unlikely friendship between Archibald MacLeish, who gave up a successful but unsatisfying law career to pursue his literary yearnings, and Ezra Pound. Reading the forty-year correspondence between MacLeish and Pound, Stefancic and Delgado draw lessons about the difficulties of attorneys trapped in worlds that give them power, prestige, and affluence but not personal satisfaction, much less creative fulfillment. Long after Pound had embraced fascism, descended into lunacy, and been institutionalized, MacLeish took up his old mentor’s cause, turning his own lack of fulfillment with the law into a meaningful crusade and ultimately securing Pound’s release from St. Elizabeths Hospital. Drawing on MacLeish’s story, Stefancic and Delgado contend that literature, public interest work, and critical legal theory offer tools to contemporary attorneys for finding meaning and overcoming professional dissatisfaction.
Download or read book Lawyers in Society written by Richard L. Abel and published by Beard Books. This book was released on 1989 with total page 580 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Contains comparative and theoretical essays on the legal profession around the world.
Download or read book Lawyers Ideals lawyers Practices written by Robert L. Nelson and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 1992 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This collection of articles is an effort to create a greater understanding of the empirical issues that lie behind the debate over whether in the practice of law the ideals of professionalism have been replaced by the demands of commercialism. This book is the most systematic attempt so far to examine what professionalism means in the various arenas of legal practice in the United States. It also seeks to advance the theoretical interpretations that lie at the heart of the scholarship on professionalism and establish a framework for analyzing the issues that is more grounded than previous idealist accounts, yet retains some of the ideas of contingency and changeability that structualist accounts have ignored"--Preface.
Download or read book Tournament of Lawyers written by Marc Galanter and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1994-01-15 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tournament of Lawyers traces in detail the rise of one hundred of the nation's top firms in order to diagnose the health of the business of American law. Galanter and Palay demonstrate that much of the large firm's organizational success stems from its ability to blend the talents of experienced partners with those of energetic junior lawyers driven by a powerful incentive—the race to win "the promotion-to-partner tournament." This calmly reasoned study reveals, however, that the very causes of the spiraling growth of the large law firm may lead to its undoing. "Galanter and Palay pose questions and offer some answers which are certain to change the way big firm practice is regarded. To describe their work as challenging is something of an understatement: they at times delight, stimulate, frustrate and even depress the reader, but they never disappoint. Tournament of Lawyers is essential to the understanding of the business of the big law firms."—Jean and Colin Fergus, New York Law Journal
Download or read book Lawyers Money and Success written by Macklin Fleming and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 1997-11-13 with total page 168 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Retired Justice Macklin Fleming argues that in its quest for money, the legal profession has lost sight of its true tasks and responsibilities, with the result that the profession is rife with client dissatisfaction, public distrust, and individual lawyer discontent. Money is now the measure of success, he says, and honesty has been diluted, while fiduciary responsibility has eroded. Fleming elaborates his case with unusual rigor. In the quest for the brass ring of financial success, corner-cutting, absence of candor, and distortions of fact have become increasingly tolerated, to the extent that clients, the public, and lawyers themselves no longer have a sense of trust and confidence in the legal profession. Obviously, changes are needed, and unless they come from within the firms themselves, lawyers can be sure that they will come from individuals, agencies, and organizations outside these firms. Attorneys in all kinds of practices, their clients in all sectors of the economy, and academics concerned with the practice of law in all its dimensions will find Fleming's book informative, challenging, and certainly provocative reading. Fleming starts by examining what he sees as a paradox: a large increase in lawyers' fees despite a fourfold increase in lawyer numbers and a threefold increase in their proportion of the general population. What happened to the law of supply and demand? he asks. After tracing the history of the large corporate law firm and its dominance within the profession, he shows how cost-effectiveness within large firms has declined while at the same time what he calls the magic of the emperor's new clothes has suspended the law of supply and demand. He discusses excessive legal fees, their resistance to client and court controls, and relates his discussion to the present pervasive distrust of lawyers among the public. Fleming outlines the four existing challenges to business-as-usual by lawyers and law firms, and then ventures his own analysis of the needed future changes in law firms. These include professional law firm management under a less archaic structure, effective integrity and quality controls, cost-controlled delivery of legal services, and increased job satisfaction for its working lawyers.
Download or read book What Do Lawyers Do written by John Flood and published by Quid Pro Books. This book was released on 2013-10-17 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A legal scholar and sociologist, John Flood spent years observing a large law firm from the inside--much like an embedded journalist, but with the perspective of a researcher on the theory and practice of legal organizations. What John Flood found and analyzed resulted in a study that has been cited by many scholars over the years as the ultimate account of the inner workings of a corporate law firm, including its relations with clients, employees, and the broader profession. Further, using four detailed case studies, he showed how the construction of legal information and problems depended heavily on the role and specialization of the lawyer and the power of the client. Now in its Second Edition, with updated references and account of the radical shifts in legal practice over the past few years in the U.S. and U.K., Flood's pathbreaking book continues to be a fascinating resource for scholars of the legal profession, as well as interested readers who want to see exposed the inner sanctum of private, big-money law practice. The new edition also adds a new, reflective introduction by Lynn Mather, the SUNY Distinguished Service Professor at the University at Buffalo. A classic resource from Quid Pro Books is now readily available worldwide, in print and ebook formats, for scholars, researchers, lawyers, and other interested readers.
Download or read book Law as a Profession written by State University of Iowa and published by . This book was released on 1922 with total page 32 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Gender Trials written by Jennifer L. Pierce and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 1995 with total page 271 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This is an exciting contribution to our understanding of gender and emotion in workplaces everywhere."—Arlie Hochschild, author of The Second Shift and The Managed Heart "As a participant observer and insightful critic of lawyers' workplaces, Jennifer Pierce gives us a richly detailed picture of sex-based inequality and the strategies necessary to address it."—Deborah L. Rhode, Director, Keck Center on Legal Ethics and the Legal Profession, Stanford University "Gender Trials is an important addition to the literature on gender and work. In studying each gender within different jobs (litigator, paralegal) and different jobs within each gender, Pierce uncovers the complexities and contradictions of 'doing gender' in contemporary law firms. The phrases 'Rambo litigator' and 'mothering paralegal' capture the normative and behavioral convergences of job and gender in these firms. In analysing resistance as well as compliance, and the emotional and identity costs associated with both dynamics, Pierce produces an insightful, and disturbing, picture of legal practice in our time."—Patricia Yancey Martin, Florida State University "Pierce's lively first-hand account of women and men at work in several law firms greatly expands our empirical and theoretical understanding of what it means to say that occupations and work organizations are 'gendered.'"—Miriam Johnson, University of Oregon
Download or read book Women Lawyers written by Mona Harrington and published by Knopf. This book was released on 2013-09-11 with total page 375 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The very presence of women in the law—normal as it may seem to us today—signals revolutionary change in a social order that for centuries entrusted control over its rules to men. Mona Harrington examines both the problems women meet when they claim equal authority as rule makers, and the impact of new perspectives and issues that women bring with them into the profession. On the basis of more than one hundred interviews with women lawyers, judges, law school professors, and law students, and through the stories of their daily experiences, Harrington pinpoints and analyzes the key factors holding women back in a profession still dominated by males—among them the “men’s club” ambience, the focus on billable hours, sexual harassment and the inequality it perpetuates, lingering unequal division of labor at home, and hostile media images of women in positions of power. She shows us what life is like for women lawyers in practice today and how their dilemmas reflect the social issues of our time. She gives us the voices of women who have adapted to the cultural codes of corporate law and women who have broken them; women who have successfully balanced their professional and private lives and women who feel trapped by the combination of long hours at the office and full responsibility at home. She introduces us to women in new and alternative firms, on the faculties of small public law schools, in in-house legal departments, in prosecutors’ offices and courtrooms—women who are devising new rules and legal theories to bring about change. Women Lawyers is must reading for every woman in the midst of—or contemplating—a career in the law, and for the men who work with them.
Download or read book BigLaw written by Mitt Regan and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2021-01-12 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Great Recession intensified large law firms’ emphasis on financial performance, leading to claims that lawyers in these firms were now guided by business rather than professional values. Based on interviews with more than 250 partners in large firms, Mitt Regan and Lisa H. Rohrer suggest that the reality is much more complex. It is true that large firm hiring, promotion, compensation, and termination policies are more influenced by business considerations than ever before and that firms actively recruit profitable partners from other firms to replace those they regard as unproductive. At the same time, law firm partners continue to seek the non-financial rewards of being members of a distinct profession and are sensitive to whether their firms are committed to providing them. Regan and Rohrer argue that modern firms responding effectively to business demands while credibly affirming the importance of non-financial professional values can create strong cultures that enhance their ability to weather the storms of the modern legal market.
Download or read book The Impact of Technology and Innovation on the Wellbeing of the Legal Profession written by Michael Legg and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book concerns the impact of recent changes in technology (including the internet and artificial intelligence), as well as innovations (such as the changing ways of billing, new law firm structures and requirements and new employment practices) on the wellbeing of lawyers. There is evidence that the wellbeing of lawyers can be enhanced or diminished by these new practices and developments.
