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Client Influence and the Contingency of Professionalism: The Work of Elite Corporate Lawyers in China

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2024

Sida Liu
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Abstract

This study examines how the professional work of elite corporate lawyers is constructed by influence from different types of clients. The data presented include interviews with 24 lawyers from six elite corporate law firms in China and the author's participant-observation in one of the firms. For these elite Chinese corporate law firms, foreign corporations, state-owned enterprises, and private enterprises constitute their extremely diversified client types. Accordingly, lawyers' work becomes flexible and adaptive to accommodate the different demands of the clients. Meanwhile, client influence on lawyers' professional work is mediated by the division of labor within the corporate law firm: whereas partners have solid control over the process of diagnosis, inference, and treatment and thus enjoy a high degree of professional autonomy, associates are largely stripped of this cultural machinery in the workplace, and their work becomes vulnerable to client influence. As a result, client influence on professional work appears to decrease with a lawyer's seniority.

Type
Law and Lawyers in China
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 40 , Issue 4 , December 2006 , pp. 751 - 782
Copyright
© 2006 Law and Society Association.

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Footnotes

This article is dedicated to Andrew Abbott for all the thought-provoking discussions on the professions during 2003–2004. I would like to thank Ruoying Chen, Robert Dingwall, Terence C. Halliday, Ryon Lancaster, Joanne Martin, Ethan Michelson, Robert L. Nelson, Susan P. Shapiro, Xiaomeng Zhang, and Dingxin Zhao for their helpful comments on earlier drafts. Herbert M. Kritzer, editor of the Law & Society Review, and four anonymous reviewers provided valuable suggestions during the revisions, which significantly improved the quality of the article. The fieldwork in Beijing benefited from the enormously helpful support from my former colleagues at Peking University School of Law and all the other lawyers I interviewed and worked with in 2002 and 2004, whose identities have to be kept confidential. Financial support for my fieldwork was provided by the research grant from Urban China Research Network. Needless to say, I am solely responsible for all the errors and problems in the article.

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