Being Good Lawyers: A Relational Approach to Law Practice

In response to past generations of debates regarding whether law is a business or profession, we advance an alternative approach that rejects the dichotomies of business and profession, or hired gun and wise counselor. Instead, we propose a relational account of law practice. Unlike frameworks grounded in assumptions of atomistic individualism or communitarianism, a relational perspective recognizes that all actors, whether individuals or organizations, have separate identities yet are intrinsically inter-connected and cannot maximize their own good in isolation. Through the lens of relational self-interest, maximizing the good of the individual or business requires consideration of the good of the neighbor, the employee or customer, and of the public. Accordingly, relational lawyers advise and assist clients, colleagues, and themselves to take into account the well-being of others when contemplating and pursuing their own interests. A relational approach to law practice does not require a choice between labeling law a business or a profession, and indeed is consistent with both perspectives. Lawyers can access relational perspectives from a wide range of understandings of the lawyer’s role, with the exception of the particular hired gun ideology that views lawyers as amoral mouthpieces for clients who act as Holmesian bad men and women aggressively pursuing their self-interest with no regard to others. The relational framework offers all lawyers, whether they see themselves as professionals or business persons, a framework for understanding that they can continue to serve as society’s civic teachers in their capacity as intermediaries between the people and the law, integrating relational self-interest into their representation of clients and their community service. By doing so, lawyers as professionals, individuals, and community members will more effectively represent clients, as well as enhance their contribution to the public good and to the quality of their own professional and private lives. They will also surmount the generation-long malaise resulting from the crisis of professionalism

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Taking Attorney-Client Communications (and Therefore Clients) Seriously

This Article argues that the Rules of Professional Conduct still need significant improvement and should adopt a materiality-based communications rule that would ensure that clients receive all information a reasonable client would consider relevant to making decisions regarding the attorney-client relationship

Federalizing Legal Ethics, Nationalizing Law Practice, and the Future of the American Legal Profession in a Global Age

This Article is organized as a response to Zaharias’s influential paper, revisiting each of his four analytical steps. Following Zacharias, Part II documents the growing nationalization and globalization of law practice, and argues that the transformation of law practice renders the state-based regulation of lawyers ineffective. Part III parts ways with Zacharias’s thesis. It asserts that nationalizing, by federalizing, legal ethics is not warranted by changing practice realities and that, worse, federalizing legal ethics without more will leave some of the most troubling aspects of the transformation of law practice, including client needs, unaddressed. Instead, Part III argues that the growing nationalization of law practice on the ground requires nationalizing the regulatory approach to law practice and offers a blueprint for such reform. In other words, it concludes that although Federalizing Legal Ethics may not have succeeded in compellingly justifying a need to federalize the rules of professional conduct, it accomplished a far much more ambitious agenda—laying a foundation for the nationalization of law practice. Finally, Part IV briefly explores some of the implications of nationalizing the regulatory approach to law practice in the context of the increased globalization of law practice

Getting In and Out of the House: The Worlds of In-House Counsel, Big Law, and Emerging Career Trajectories of In-House Lawyers

The traditional story of in-house counsel is of a transformation and triumph over “Big Law” in a zero-sum game for power, prestige, and money. That story, however, is inaccurate descriptively, prescriptively, and normatively. Descriptively, in-house lawyers were part of the legal elite dominating corporate counseling before large law firms first rose to power and prominence. In-house counsel then lost ground and the position of general counsel to Big Law lawyers between the 1940s and 1970s, only to mount an impressive comeback to elite status beginning in the 1970s. Yet the in-house comeback was not a simple power struggle with Big Law. Rather, modern in-house lawyers including the “new” general counsel came from within the ranks of Big Law, an offshoot rather than a competitor of large law firms, sharing Big Law’s background, training, and, more importantly, professional values, ideology, and ethos. Thus, the story of in-house lawyers and their relationship with Big Law is one of a complex symbiotic affiliation, not a competitive zero-sum game