The ethical infrastructure of legal practice in larger law firms: values, policy and behaviour

The article examines the impact of the cultures and organisational structures of large law firms on individual lawyers' ethics. The paper suggests that large law firms in Australia should consciously design and implement 'ethical infrastructures' to both counteract pressures for misbehaviour and positively promote ethical behaviour and discussion. The paper goes on to explain what implementing ethical infrastructures in law firms could and should mean by reference to what Australian law firms are already doing and US innovations in this area. Finally, the paper warns that the 'ethical infrastructure' of a firm should not be seen merely as the formal ethics policies explicitly enunciated by management. Formal and legalistic ethical infrastructures that fail to support or encourage the development of individual lawyers' awareness oftheir own ethical values and ethical judgment in practice will be useless

Re-Defining Superwoman: An Essay on Overcoming the “Maternal Wall” in the Legal Workplace

As Professor Joan Williams comments, most women never even approach the glass ceiling; they are stopped dead, long beforehand, by the maternal wall. The maternal wall affects women with children in many aspects of their jobs, including hiring, promotions, pay, and even terminations. It is difficult for mothers to perform as ideal workers, because pregnancy, maternity leave, and the continual demands of child-rearing inevitably cause them to be absent from work. In addition, because mothers are not similarly situated to men or women without children, courts permit employers to treat them differently, which usually means they are treated more poorly. It is not my goal in this piece to solve the maternal wall problem or even to discuss it from a holistic perspective. Rather, my goal is quite modest. I will focus my discussion of the maternal wall on the legal workplace and explain why it is necessary to redefine Superwoman in order to succeed as a mother-attorney. This Essay is divided into two parts: the Problem and the Solutions. Part II discusses the maternal wall problem in the workplace. Part III will discuss proposed solutions for dealing with discrimination against mothers in the legal workplace. This abstract has been adapted from the author\u27s introduction

Attorneys’ Fees in Antitrust Litigation: Making the System Fairer

(Excerpt) Section 4(a) of the Clayton Act entitles prevailing plaintiffs in private antitrust actions to recover, in addition to treble damages, their reasonable attorneys\u27 fees. Unique when adopted as part of the Sherman Act in 1890, this fee-shifting provision has been imitated, at least in part, in over 100 federal statutes. In providing for attorneys\u27 fees, Congress intended to promote private enforcement of the antitrust laws and to insulate the treble damages recovery from expenditures for legal fees. Fee-shifting is mandatory where a plaintiff prevails, but the court has some leeway in setting the amount of the fee. The controversy over the quantum of proof necessary to establish the fee award has been extensively litigated in the district and circuit courts. Although there is now widespread agreement on the principles for measuring fee awards, the criteria include a subjective component that may yield vastly differing results in cases involving similar facts

Is Pro Bono Practice In Legal “Backwaters” Beyond The Scope of The Model Rules?

[Excerpt] While many private sector attorneys offer pro bono legal services that reflect the same level of diligence and skill characteristic of the work done on behalf of their paying clients, the egregious failures described in the MC v. GC case and those that occur in many unreported matters highlight the dangers of pro bono initiatives designed to bridge the “access to justice gap.” As used here, the term “justice gap” refers to the chasm between the need for legal representation in civil disputes and public interest attorneys available to serve poor and working class clients. Justice gap pro bono programs connect low-income individuals in need of legal assistance in matters such as eviction prevention, family disputes, and consumer debt collection cases with attorneys from large law firms that typically specialize in commercial litigation and corporate transactions. Though well intentioned, justice gap pro bono initiatives that succeed do so in spite of the impediments to ethical representation that pervade this method of legal service delivery. The market forces and “informal collegial control” that shape attorney conduct in the for-profit setting are often absent within the world of pro bono service. Moreover, the ethics rules that should govern pro bono attorneys offer inadequate guidance to lawyers grappling with the unique concerns of pro bono lawyering practiced in a for-profit context

Labour Supply, Work Effort and Contract Choice: Theory and Evidence on Physicians

We develop and estimate a generalized labour supply model that incorporates work effort into the standard consumption-leisure trade-off. We allow workers a choice between two contracts: a piece rate contract, wherein he is paid per unit of service provided, and a mixed contract, wherein he receives an hourly wage and a reduced piece rate. This setting gives rise to a nonconvex budget set and an efficient budget constraint (the upper envelope of contract-specific budget sets). We apply our model to data collected on specialist physicians working in the Province of Quebec (Canada). Our data set contains information on each physician’s labour supply and their work effort (clinical services provided per hour worked). It also covers a period of policy reform under which physicians could choose between two compensation systems: the traditional fee-for-service, under which physicians receive a fee for each service provided, and mixed remuneration, under which physicians receive a per diem as well as a reduced fee-for-service. We estimate the model using a discrete choice approach. We use our estimates to simulate elasticities and the effects of ex ante reforms on physician contracts. Our results show that physician services and effort are much more sensitive to contractual changes than is their time spent at work. Our results also suggest that a mandatory reform, forcing all physicians to adopt the mixed remuneration system, would have had substantially larger effects on physician behaviour than those observed under the voluntary reform.labour supply, effort, contracts, practice patterns of physicians, discrete choice econometric models, mixed logit