In recent years, the legal profession has undergone significant organizational restructuring with the dramatic growth of firms and a rapid increase in the number of female lawyers. We argue that big firms actively recruited female lawyers during a period when women were needed to fill roles of cultivating and serving increasing numbers of institutional or corporate clients. Yet despite women's contribution of legal talent to the development of clientele, a glass ceiling has restricted their opportunities to advance in law firm hierarchies. We examine two approaches to gender inequities in law firm hierarchy: disparity as economic efficiency and disparity as structural discrimination. Both approaches neglect aspects of social relations within law firms as well as social resources lawyers bring to their work. We therefore introduce a social capital perspective to unpack how human capital is enhanced and how exclusionary practices are reinforced in law firms. Using a longitudinal study of male and female lawyers conducted from 1990 to 1996, we specify several different forms of social capital. The findings from our study reveal that female lawyers participate fully in the accumulation of social capital in law firms, through service to valued institutional clientele and high billings, yet their efforts result in reduced probabilities of partnership.

Our analysis addresses whether the legal profession can be classified as experiencing successful feminization. Drawing on the work of Reskin and Roos (1990) and Wright and Jacobs (1994), we suggest that relatively successful feminization occurs where (1) occupational growth is rapid, (2) graduate and specialized degrees are important, and (3) wages are increasing. We develop an argument for the legal profession as a case of successful feminization with data taken from the U.S. census 1970-1990 and from a cohort of lawyers surveyed in 1984 and 1990 as part of the National Survey of Lawyers' Career Satisfaction (Hirsch 1992). Our results suggest that the legal profession was on the road to achieving successful gender integration and feminization during the 1980s. Overall improvements in the economic standing of female attorneys compared with males is occurring among women at or below the median in the earnings distribution and among elite lawyers at the top of the earnings distribution. There is also evidence of a persistent “glass ceiling” in the earnings distribution for women. Analyses of change in evaluations of legal work settings suggest that changes in earnings that favor women's successful entry into law are occurring in a context of growing dissatisfaction with legal work settings. We discuss the implications of our findings for further analyses of the gender integration of male-dominated occupations.

The past 15 years have seen a significant attempt by governments in the United Kingdom to restructure the market for legal services. As a part of this program, in 1992 the English bar finally lost its exclusive jurisdiction over advocacy. Although solicitors could qualify to appear as advocates in the higher courts, few have so done. We explore the perceptions of legal professionals, solicitors, and barristers through a qualitative study. By examining the legal profession as a set of connected but differentiated and competing fields of practice, we show how change resonates with the legal market. We find that institutional coherence and client service vie with the desire to become complete lawyers in the rationale for solicitor advocacy. The identification of institutional constraints on the pursuit of professional hegemony leads us to qualify the proposition that professionals are motivated purely by economic returns or market dominance.

Large law firms are increasingly moving away from the “up or out” organizational model by employing lawyers on a permanent basis under a variety of titles, a trend with important consequences for the structure of lawyers' career opportunities. Some firms, however, have moved farther in this direction than others. Using data from a nationwide sample of law firm establishments, this study investigates factors that lead firms to implement permanent employment arrangements. The results show that firms that are more exposed to new features of the changing legal environment make greater use of permanent employees. Permanent employment arrangements are more common in law firms where work is more complex, ties to clients are weaker, and lawyers place less emphasis on collegiality. Effects are stronger for lawyers with nontraditional titles such as “senior attorney” and “senior counsel” than for permanent associates, suggesting that firms employ two distinct categories of permanent non-partner lawyers.

In the U.S. legal system, litigants frequently retain counsel to represent their interests in civil cases, particularly when the stakes are high. Scholarly work and anecdotal evidence suggest that variation in the quality of advocacy has the potential to affect litigant success. We examine the relationship between attorney characteristics, case outcomes, and judicial voting in products liability decisions of the U.S. Courts of Appeals. Our analysis found some differences in the levels of experience and specialization of counsel representing defendants and plaintiffs and that counsel expertise was, at times, related to litigant success. In a multivariate model of decisionmaking, judges were less likely to support the position of plaintiffs when they were represented by counsel appearing for the first time before the circuit. When defendants were represented by attorneys who did not specialize in relevant areas of the law, judges were more likely to decide in favor of the plaintiff. These findings suggest that those attorneys who do not meet a minimum threshold of expertise will be less likely to find judicial support for their client than other attorneys. Such attorneys may be less successful as a result of their lack of familiarity with the law and appellate process or because they make poor choices regarding the likelihood of success on appeal.

This research note calls attention to some basic but rather neglected questions about life in the legal profession: Are lawyers happy in their work? Do patterns of stratification within the profession translate into differences in work satisfaction? Does satisfaction with different components of legal work vary across employment statuses and practice contexts?

Given that job satisfaction is a highly subjective phenomenon, some sociolegal scholars may question its value as an object of social scientific inquiry. I argue, however, that to ignore the question of lawyers' happiness is a mistake. Despite their limitations, studies of lawyers' work satisfaction can be useful in several ways. First, job satisfaction can be viewed as a stratification measure, complementing more traditional measures such as income and hierarchical position. If satisfaction is unevenly distributed within the profession in some systematic way (e.g., if women are less satisfied than men or if minorities less satisfied than whites), we might interpret this uneven distribution as a form of inequality and seek to explain its causes and possible remedies.

One definition of the “proletarianization of the professional” is that the professional loses “control over policy and value objectives” in his or her work (Derber 1982b: 17). Proletarianization is normally explained as resulting from workplace labor process control (ibid., p. 31). A compatible, but quite different, explanation relates proletarianization to changes in the social practices and ideological orientations of professional careers. In this research note, I present this different explanation and suggest avenues for empirical research.

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.