The Professions Are Dead, Long Live the Professions: Legal Practice in a Postprofessional World

Abstract

The American legal profession is facing challenges that are sending tremors through its institutional foundations. On the one hand, U.S. lawyers appear to be wielding ever increasing power as reflected in recent victories in litigation with cigarette manufacturers and in the now pending challenges to the firearms industry. At the same time, the profession finds its traditional prerogatives under increasing challenge with the push for multidisciplinary professional practices, direct encroachment by a variety of service providers (accountants, consultants, paralegals, etc.), and mounting political attacks on the profession for its apparent greed (e.g., huge fees from the tobacco litigation) and apparent arrogance (Glaberson 1999). Much as the businesses and governments who bear the bulk of health care expenses forced major restructuring of health care delivery, the large consumers of legal services (which are consuming an ever larger share of legal services; see Heinz, Nelson, & Laumann 1998) are seeking means of limiting and monitoring the costs of those services (ibid.; Kritzer 1994). Lawyers increasingly find themselves working not as independent professionals but as employees of bureaucratically organized law firms, corporations, and government. The dynamics of this change, combined with shifts in where legal effort is directed, have attracted the attention of scholars (Galanter & Palay 1991; Heinz et al. 1997; Heinz, Nelson, Laumann, & Michelson 1998; Seron 1996; Spangler 1986; Van Hoy 1997) in no small part because it has major implications for how we think about the legal profession, in its multiplicity of forms, as a profession.