Using data from personal interviews with 777 Chicago lawyers, constituting a random cross section of the urban bar, the authors estimate the relative volumes of effort devoted to each of several fields of law, analyze the degree to which practitioners specialize in fields or groups of fields, and examine the patterns of co-practice of the fields. They find that the total effort of the Chicago bar is about evenly divided between work for corporate clients and work for individual clients. They also suggest that, while relatively few lawyers are highly specialized to a particular doctrinal area of the law, most are specialized to the service of the needs of a particular type of client. Exploring possible implications of their findings, the authors speculate that lawyers who are specialized to clients rather than to substantive fields may lack the incentive to devote their resources to the rationalization of legal doctrine.

Several years ago, the American Bar Foundation initiated a modest investigation into the feasibility of designing a computer that could automate the assembly of form legal documents such as wills, trusts, complaints, and the like. The investigation has since matured into a major research effort to design an entirely new kind of computational processor. A prototype processor has now been constructed, and it is undergoing field tests to determine whether it truly fulfills the specialized needs of the legal drafter.

This article briefly traces the history of the project, explaining the motivation behind it and describing the role of the participants. The article then introduces a new language—the principal result of the research effort—that may be used to draft both form documents and statutes, regulations, and other “instructions” defining how form documents are to be assembled. The new language, a subset of English, is fully comprehensible both to attorneys and to a properly designed computational processor. An attorney or paraprofessional may redraft form legal documents, statutes, and regulations in the new language and then feed them directly into the computer; no conventional programming is required. The computer asks questions couched in language taken from the forms and statutes, performs any necessary computations, and draws any necessary legal conclusions. The computer then returns client-customized legal documents ready for court filing. The article tells how the new processor may be set up to perform even the most complex drafting tasks—even complex tax-return preparation. Particular emphasis is placed on having the computer force the attorney or paraprofessional to proceed in a highly organized fashion with the development of a complex delivery system so that the computer, and not the attorney or paraprofessional, keeps track of the complex linkages between the elements of the system as it evolves.

In its concluding section, the article explores the possible impact of this new technology upon the legal profession and the public, and the author expresses his view that centralized systems set up by legal specialists to support the work of numerous nonspecialists may expand the areas in which the generalist may do competent work and may enable the general practitioner to buck the current trend toward specialization.

Elite attorneys have been the objects of social scientific study and speculation for many years. This article contributes to that body of thought by reporting some of the results of a research project that studied 59 members of Chicago's corporate actor legal elite-the lawyers who serve the city's major business, social, civic, political, and cultural organizations.

The article briefly defines the elite studied and the design of the overall re-search project. It then focuses on the working situations of these lawyers and the professional roles they play for their respective corporate actors. A division of legal labor that is discovered to separate house counsel from law firm partners among the elite is analyzed in some depth.

Since the professional roles of these elite attorneys differ from those de-scribed by other social scientists earlier, the article concludes by offering a theory to explain this apparent social change. By tapping recent discussions of the coming of postliberal society, it suggests that corporate actors engineer this new division of legal labor for their attorneys in response to the complex new legal problems posed by institutional changes in the larger society.

This study considers political structure in bar associations with respect to one central problem: the tension between democracy and oligarchy in the internal politics of bar associations. Drawing on both theoretical and empirical material, the authors outline a series of indicators on which the degree of democracy and oligarchy in the organized bar may be measured and then apply these criteria to the Chicago Bar Association from 1950 through 1974. The authors briefly review writings on the political structure of bar associations in the United States and note relevant theoretical perspectives on the politics of voluntary associations. They distinguish several patterns of oligarchy and democracy and explore the consequences of certain trends for the Chicago Bar Association and other bar associations.

There have been few successful attempts in the history of the organized bar since 1870 to establish alternative bar groups that challenge the dominance of the large comprehensive local and state bar associations over the representation of lawyers' interests. Founded in 1969, a product of the social ferment of the 1960s, the Chicago Council of Lawyers provides an example of one such attempt. This paper examines the conditions under which a reform-oriented counter-bar association is likely to arise, the factors that permitted its successful establishment in Chicago, and the functions it serves within the legal profession as an alternative to the Chicago Bar Association.

While the violence surrounding the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago may have sparked the formation of an alternative bar association, it was intraprofessional matters that deeply concerned the founders of the Council particularly the performance of the organized bar in providing legal services to the poor and in improving the quality of the judiciary. Within the legal profession itself there was also a striking disjunction between the age of the leadership of the bar and of the numerous young lawyers who flooded in-to the bar in the 1960s. Preexisting networks of young activist lawyers greatly facilitated organizational formation.

As a reformist group with a small and relatively homogeneous membership, and lacking strong ties to powerful institutions, the Council can afford to take strong stances on controversial issues. By aggressively supporting positions at odds with those of the more established bar associations, and thus providing the media, the public, and legislators with an alternative viewpoint, the Council contributes to shattering the myth of a unified profession and to the demystification of professional authority.

Legal ethics has recently become the focus of professional and public concern. One aspect of that concern has to do with the education and socialization of law students in professional responsibility. This study, using data from a sample of law students in diverse school settings, examines the influence of prevailing learning norms in legal education on student responses to courses in professional responsibility. The author also reviews the bases of ambiguous sentiments about the role of education in professional ethics and concludes with a discussion of the difficulties and dilemmas involved in attempts to alter the established mode of instruction.

The author addresses himself to the problems of sex discrimination in pensions. He contends that there have been fundamental errors in the perceptions of those problems. Equality in pay—both of wages and of fringe benefits—requires equality in employer contributions, which produces actuarial equality in benefits. This is true for pensions, at least, both as a matter of statutory interpretation and as a matter of fundamental fairness, absent a compelling need that has not been and probably cannot be shown. He concludes that Manhart was wrongly decided but that in any event it should be given the narrowest possible interpretation and not be permitted to sire illegitimate progeny.

A legal service delivery system intended to facilitate the providing of services by private practitioners should, to be complete, include among its functions three that are of special importance. First, it should diagnose legal problems. Second, it should make available to a person with a legal problem the information needed for informed selection of a lawyer. And third, it should, when necessary, help the prospective client to make the initial contact with a lawyer. Lawyer advertising, specialty certification, lawyer directories, and lawyer referral services perform some of these functions, but no one mechanism performs all three adequately. A system combining the lawyer directory with an expanded lawyer referral service might do so and thus might be a more complete answer to the problem of delivery of legal services.

Litigation concerning conditions in institutions such as prisons or mental hospitals does not stop at the issuance of a remedial decree. Steps must be taken to assure implementation. Increasingly, the courts are resorting to special masters to assist them in implementing such institutional reform. While the use of masters by courts is a firmly established tradition, the role assigned to masters in the institutional context is often an extraordinarily broad and intrusive one. As a result, serious questions have arisen about this new extra-traditional master role and about the applicability, the sufficiency, of the traditional rationales and restraints. This article is among the first in a small but developing body of literature that begins to examine the new master role and the questions concerning it.

This article examines in detail patterns of change in career-relevant interests, attitudes, and personality characteristics among first-year students in one law school. The data presented suggest that a single entering law school class can be viewed as a varied group in terms of career plans and potential behavioral styles. Moreover, immersion in the law school environment may accentuate this initial variability. Although some studies have suggested that, overall, first-year law students experience a drop in law interests, including interests in altruistic and “socially conscious” career activities, the methods of analysis used in this study suggest alternative interpretations of some aspects of such changes. In addition, the author believes these methods shed greater light on the overall process of professional development in law school.

The human subjects protection committee is the principal legal mechanism for protecting the rights and welfare of human subjects of biomedical and behavioral research. In this article the author explores the influence of variations in the structure of the review process and in the composition and operating procedures of the committees on committee performance. He also assesses revisions in the review process proposed by the National Commission on the Protection of Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioral Research.

It is not an exaggeration to say that we live in an era preoccupied with the problems and challenges of obtaining justice in civil cases. Concerns expressed about the civil justice system range from warnings that civil court dockets are clogged by disputants too litigious for their own good to complaints that the legal system is used too rarely in civil cases.

The authors approach their analysis with a sense that this subject area is in need of more and better theory. It is an unfortunate fact that discussions of civil justice—and suggestions for reform—have been marked by contradiction and confusion and have been engrossed with small matters that tend to obscure from view the system as a whole.

The first part of this essay focuses on what the civil justice system is and does. It presents a five-stage model of civil case processing and examines relationships between this model and the criminal justice system. The second part of the essay considers this model in a broader context. Here the authors examine two paradigms of civil case processing and their implications for the implementation of legal norms and the pursuit of justice in society.

Because the holding in Bates v. State Bar of Arizona is narrow and because some lawyers remain opposed to advertising, the dispute over lawyer advertising continues. Many who favor restricting advertising contend that it will not benefit consumers. They argue that prices must either rise to cover the cost of advertising or, if prices do fall, that quality must also drop.

This article addresses itself to both charges. The first section is theoretical, demonstrating how advertising could lower the costs of producing legal services. Advertising increases the volume of services a lawyer can expect to sell. Greater volume, in turn, allows greater specialization in production, more effective use of systems management, and the substitution of paralegals and capital for lawyer inputs. The authors argue that each of these changes will lower costs, thereby lowering prices without necessarily reducing quality. The second section is empirical, comparing the prices and particularly the quality of services produced by a heavy advertiser, the Legal Clinic of Jacoby & Meyers, and the traditional firms in the Los Angeles market with which the clinic competes. Quality is defined both subjectively and objectively, and original data are presented indicating that the quality of service that the clinic supplies is at least equivalent, and on some measures better, than the quality of service that traditional firms provide.

This article, the first part of a larger study devoted to the compensation of damages caused by pollution, reviews the existing sources of compensation in the United States: the common law of torts, federal and state statutes, and various forms of commercial insurance coverages. It shows how the rules of nuisance law have remained flexible in response to changing customs and public policies, how for a long time prevailing attitudes favored industrial development and economic growth over physical comfort, and how increasing concerns about the long-term health effects of environmental pollution have created a trend in the opposite direction. The author also points out that the existing system of liability and compensation, which relies on individual actions and case-by-case adjudication, is not ideally suited for dealing with the effects of large-scale pollution or for the —primarily political—task of evaluating and balancing all of the interests and values, present and future, economic and noneconomic, that need to be considered before decisions can be made that are bound to affect the health and economic well-being of a large part of the population beyond the immediate parties to a lawsuit. This indicates a need for a comprehensive approach that would not only coordinate the rules concerning liability and those concerning insurance and other sources of compensation but would also make the compensation of pollution damages an integral part of a thoroughly rational and consistent environmental policy. The various possibilities of constructing such a comprehensive compensation system will be discussed in the second part of the study, to be published in a forthcoming issue of the American Bar Foundation Research Journal.