Abstract
This paper examines the complex and subtle world of lawyer–client relationships. Taking corporate lawyers as our case study, we provide an examination of the strategies and tactics that lawyers use in dealing with their clients. Rather than adopting the binary distinction between professionalism and commercialism on which much past research has been based, we here take a more pragmatic approach. Informed by recent work on relational regulation by Silbey, we embrace a broader framework that incorporates lawyers' relations, organizational contexts and professional proscriptions. Based on analyses of interviews with 106 corporate lawyers working in large law firms, we demonstrate that there is a heterogeneous set of practices that characterizes corporate lawyers' relationships with clients. We observe four ideal types that run along two axes: the extent to which lawyers reference law versus experience to explain their behavior or decisions; and the extent to which lawyers frame their role in terms of individual action or as part of a collectivity. We argue that identifying ideal types allows us to open up the scope of understanding the ways in which lawyers interact with their clients.
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