LEGAL PROFESSION

LEGAL PROFESSION. Known as "the bar," after the railing in courtrooms, the legal profession is the vocation of the law, and its practitioners include essentially those who hold licenses to practice law granted by states or particular courts, but also those who through legal education or vocation participate in the culture or institutions of the law. Law is a profession, and, as such, it requires special knowledge and skill acquired under the supervision of a practitioner and is subject to standards of admission and regulation by an elite within the profession.

There were lawyers of various sorts in ancient Greece and Rome, but the legal profession in its current sense was a medieval invention. The development of a professional bench and bar in England began in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, shortly after the rediscovery of the texts of classic Roman law led both to more sophisticated forms of legal education and to a more complex system of national and Church laws. In early medieval England, university instruction prepared young men to practice canon and admiralty law, while a loose band of full-time lawyers consolidated into various London houses or "inns" in which the older lawyers who pled before the Courts taught younger lawyers. These inns became the basis for both the schooling and the management of the bar. By the dawn of the American colonial era, English lawyers usually studied the liberal arts at a college or university and then studied law in one of the London Inns of Court. Scotland maintained a similar institution in the College of the Faculty of Advocates.

Early America

American colonists who acted as judges or lawyers initially had no legal education but acted from their consciences and such law books as they had, to the degree they understood them. By the late 1600s, a few attorneys traveled to England to study in the Inns of Court, being called to the bar in London and returning to the United States. Although this practice began in Massachusetts, by 1770 most colonial lawyers trained in England were in the southern colonies. Throughout the eighteenth century, a few quite influential lawyers emigrated to the colonies from England, Ireland, and Scotland. Moreover, the number of lawyers with legal training had grown large enough for successive generations to be taught through apprenticeships. On the eve of the Revolution, several colleges occasionally taught law as an academic pursuit, although only the College of William and Mary had a law professor.

Lawyers were active during the Revolution and in the early Republic. Twenty-four of the forty-six signers of the Declaration of Independence were lawyers, and its drafter, lawyer Thomas Jefferson, wrote it in the form of a legal petition. Indeed, many leaders of the early states were lawyers, as were Jefferson, John Adams, Alexander Hamilton, and other leaders of the young national government.

With independence, different states and the federal courts had varied approaches to the bar. Until 1801 the U.S. Supreme Court required a distinction between attorneys, who appeared in court, and counselors at law, who provided legal advice, a division similar to the English distinction between barristers and solicitors, and one followed in various ways by some states. This practice died early in the 1800s, since which time all U.S. lawyers have been considered eligible to perform either role.

On the other hand, in 1790 Massachusetts passed a law attempting to end the legal profession, by allowing any person to represent another in court. Many states embraced this legal deprofessionalization. In 1842 New Hampshire declared that any adult could act as an attorney, a law copied by Maine, Wisconsin, and Indiana. A similar mood had already led to popular elections of judges in which candidates were not required to be lawyers; this practice began in 1832 and eventually spread to thirty-eight states, in many of which it still continues.

Even so, the growing complexity of the law and the legalistic nature of the national culture spurred both evolution and enlargement in the bar. The expansion of commercial, industrial, canal, road, and railroad concerns, growing personal wealth, and increased state and federal regulation all led to a swelling demand for lawyers. Moreover, law came to be seen as the tool to balance power between the state and the citizen. As Alexis de Tocqueville noted, Americans "prize freedom much, they generally value legality still more: they are less afraid of tyranny than of arbitrary power."

Throughout the nineteenth century, most attorneys read law in the office of an experienced lawyer, who would appear before a judge to move the student be sworn into the practice of law. Occasionally, judges would interrogate the applicant, but usually the word of the older lawyer alone was sufficient, and the attorney was launched on a career. The result was a loose-knit fraternity of lawyers with greatly varying levels of skill and professionalism.

The Enhancement of Professional Standards

After the Civil War, lawyers concerned with the bar's poor reputation formed institutions to improve the standards of both the profession and the existing body of law. Bar associations were created to establish standards for lawyer admission and conduct, as well as to promote law reform, commencing with the Association of the Bar of the City of New York in 1870, and the American Bar Association in 1878. These associations pressed state legislatures and courts to hold law schools to standards of accreditation and to promote law reform projects, such as the American Law Institute, formed in 1923 to encourage modernization and uniformity among state laws.

Two nineteenth-century innovations led to greater restrictions on entry to the practice. The first was the growth of legal education, which became a requirement to practice in most states by the end of the century (see Law schools). The second was the advent of formal examinations as a condition of licensure. In the 1850s the Massachusetts Court of Common Pleas instituted written exams for all candidates, rather than oral exams administered by individual judges. This practice spread slowly, although it blossomed in the 1870s and 1880s. Although some states conferred licenses on graduates of their state

law schools, every state employed some form of bar examination by the mid-twentieth century. At the start of the twenty-first century, both legal education and the bar exam remain significant steps toward entry of the profession. By 2000 almost every applicant for the bar had graduated from law school. Of 72,704 people examined that year to enter the bar in the fifty states, only 59 had read for the bar rather than taking law degrees. The bar examination remains a formidable barrier to entry of the profession; only 47,160 of those examined, or 65 percent, passed.

Two restrictions on entry into the profession, however, ended in the 1800s. Until 1844, the legal profession, like most professions in the United States, was open only to men descended from Europeans; women and members of other races were excluded. The first lawyer of African descent, a native of Indiana named Macon Bolling Allen, was admitted in 1844 to practice law in Maine. In 1847 he became a justice of the peace in Massachusetts. Myra Bradwell, arguably the first American woman lawyer, was a law publisher in Chicago who passed the Illinois bar examination in 1869 but was initially denied a license by that state and by the U.S. Supreme Court. She was admitted to practice in 1890, and her admission was back-dated by the state supreme court to 1868. Lemma Barkaloo appears to be the first female law student, admitted to St. Louis Law School in 1868. In 1872 Charlotte E. Ray became the first black woman lawyer in the United States and the first woman lawyer in the District of Columbia. Despite these initial inroads, the law remained a largely white, male domain, and large numbers of both women and minorities began to enter the profession only in the later twentieth century.

The Growing Size of Law Firms

The twentieth century saw a dramatic increase in the size of law firms and the degree of specialization of legal practice. In a trend that began with New York firms, such as Cravath, large numbers of young lawyers were hired to work as associates for a smaller number of partners, selected from among the associates who were not culled out over a seven-year period; this pyramidal structure had the effect of increasing the fees earned by partners. It also allowed a partnership to have hundreds of specialists and to provide a broader range of services to large multinational clients. By the close of the century, many firms had hundreds of lawyers, working from multiple cities. These firms expect their associates to work very long hours, though for very high pay. Despite this high pay for associates, in the year 2000 partnership shares reached as high as $3.2 million per partner and averaged just over $800,000 in the richest one hundred U.S. law firms.

As law firms grew, a gulf widened between lawyers representing plaintiffs and those representing defendants. Except for suits initiated by corporations, most large firms specialized in corporate defense and the support of commercial activities. Plaintiffs' work generally fell to lawyers in solo practice or to small firms without conflicts arising from work for clients like those they sued, with less over-head, and with less of the liability risk faced by large firms with work done by many partners. This division was heralded in 1946, with the formation of an association for lawyers representing claimants for workman's compensation, which later became the American Trial Lawyers Association.

Changes in information technology, especially the growth of electronic information archives and communications systems, growing competition from organizations besides law firms, increased reliance on non-legal treatments for criminal behavior, an increasingly global economy, and greater specialization and enlargement of the profession will all alter the legal profession in the twenty-first century. Still, lawyers will continue to perform a variety of unique tasks, particularly in managing the criminal justice system, assisting in government, managing complex commercial transactions, and resolving disputes.

The bar has grown faster than the population as a whole. In 1850 there were 23,900 lawyers; in 1900 there were 114,700. In the year 2000, the U.S. Census Bureau estimated that 955,300 lawyers and judges were primarily employed in legal practice in the United States. An additional 15,000 were law teachers and another 80,000 lawyers were inactive, engaged in non-legal work, or retired. There are expected to be 1,355,000 U.S. lawyers by 2005. The legal profession has become an important part of the U.S. economy, not only by facilitating commercial transactions and dispute resolutions but also as an industry. In 1999 the U.S. Census Bureau estimated that legal services in the United States generated $157 billion in revenues.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Abel, Richard. American Lawyers. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989.

Dos Passos, John. The American Lawyer: As He Was—As He Is— As He Can Be. Reprint. Littleton, Colo.: Rothman, 1986. The original edition was published in 1907.

Pound, Roscoe. The Lawyer from Antiquity to Modern Times, with Particular Reference to the Development of Bar Associations in the United States. St. Paul, Minn.: West, 1953.

Reed, Alfred Z. Training for the Public Profession of the Law. New York: Arno, 1976.

SteveSheppard

See alsoAmerican Bar Association ; National Lawyers Guild .

Legal Services

Legal services are an important consideration for any business owner, but especially for small business owners, who often face a number of legal hurdles. Protecting the owner's personal assets from lawsuits against the business, ensuring protection for the business against lawsuits charging discrimination, wrongful termination, and sexual harassment, and handling employee contracts, copyright claims, and incorporation are just a few of the legal issues that commonly face small business owners.

The high costs of retaining a lawyer often make it seem as if competent legal services are out of reach of most small business owners. In addition, experts emphasize the dangers of entering into legal agreements without first obtaining advice from a qualified attorney. But there are reasonably priced methods of obtaining such services, like pre-paid plans and legal software. In many cases, this attempt to cut corners can turn small problems into big ones for small business owners. "Perhaps your tax structure is not to your best advantage, or you are not adequately protected from liability," Charles Poling noted in the New Mexico Business Journal. "If you're in a regulated business, you might run afoul of the law simply because you haven't gotten educated by your lawyer. Failing to consult with a securities or financial lawyer when you're raising capital can cause serious problems."

The type of legal services a small business should obtain varies with the size and age of the business. "Exactly what type of lawyer you need depends on what business you're in, and what stage it's at," Poling wrote. "A general business lawyer can help you as day-to-day questions come up, reviewing contracts and tax questions. But for more complicated matters, you might need a specialist…. Just starting up? Find someone who specializes in forming corporations or partnerships. Going public? Find a securities lawyer. Other specialties include environmental law, banking, patenting, copyrighting, medicine, nonprofit corporations, employment law, and so on."

According to Michael Barrier in Success, the best way to find a good attorney is by getting referrals from people you trust, especially those with similar legal needs. Before signing a retainer, small business owners should inquire about the attorney's experience, charges, and potential conflicts of interest. It may also be helpful to check your insurance policy, because certain litigation expenses may be covered.

PRE-PAID LEGAL SERVICES

Perhaps the most cost-effective way for small business owners to obtain legal advice is through a pre-paid legal services plan. These plans provide companies with affordable access to legal advice and attorney's services for one low, monthly fee.

Caldwell Legal, U.S.A. pioneered the concept in 1967 and remains one of the largest pre-paid firms serving small business. It offers Caldwell's Business Protector Program, available in all 50 states. At each Caldwell field office, attorneys provide telephone consultation, document review, letter writting, and other services, all for $37 per month. The plan includes unlimited hours of toll-free telephone consultation. The fee is indeed modest—based on Caldwell's own research which shows that 73 percent of legal problems can be solved with a single phone call. If more extensive services are needed, additional fees are applied as they are accrued. Caldwell charges hourly fees, if necessary, at the rate of $85 per hour ($125 per hour in New York).

Pre-Paid Legal Services is another company specializing in family and employee legal plans and may have solutions for the family-based small business and for businesses that wish to provide legal coverage for their employees (in the same way as they might provide health insurance). A family plan will range from around $16 to $36 a month for basic services—or higher if certain add-ons are selected.

ADVANTAGES OF PRE-PAID SERVICES

The primary advantage associated with pre-paid legal services is savings. For example, a typical pre-paid plan might charge $85 to $125 per hour for attorney's fees, plus the monthly premium, which can range up to $100 per month. Without the plan, the attorney's fees begin at around $200 per hour with a retainer fee of several thousand dollars often demanded up front.

Quality service is another promise of most pre-paid plans. For example, one plan requires its attorneys to have a minimum of 15 years of service, experience in business law, a favorable rating from Martindale-Hubbell (the rating service of the American Bar Association), and a clean record that shows no indication of ethical or malpractice claims against the attorney. Of course, these services vary in quality, just as attorneys vary in quality. Small business owners should do their research before signing up with a service. There are new ones joining the industry each year.

Another benefit of pre-paid plans is their size. Because they pool hundreds of small businesses, they instantly become one of the largest clients of whatever firm handles the plan's account. This is a huge benefit for small business owners. One owner on his or her own will be a very small part of any law firm's business. As one business owner in Ohio said of his former legal firm, "I felt I wasn't important enough to them." As part of the pre-paid plan, however, the small business becomes one part of a very important client that the law firm wants to keep happy to ensure continued business. Like HMOs, pre-paid plans offer collective bargaining power, as lawyers find it worth their while to offer low-cost services to plan members because of the high volume of business that is generated.

Pre-paid plans also make it easier for small businesses to practice preventive law instead of reacting to crises. Without the plan, a business owner is more likely to take his or her chances in any given situation and hope that no legal problems arise. This is because asking for legal advice can be so expensive. The plan, however, makes advice readily available and encourages owners to make use of it so that small problems do not become big problems.

HOW TO SELECT THE PLAN THAT IS RIGHT FOR YOU

The most important thing to look for is the number and type of services offered at a reduced rate as part of the plan. The number of services might be lower than you expect, so make sure the plan has what you need. Also find out what the plan charges for services that are not covered as part of the basic plan. A set fee for additional work may be cheaper in the long run than receiving a discount on the firm's "usual fee" for such services.

Additional steps to take include:

• Deciding whether you would prefer to work with just one lawyer over the years, or whether the service can provide a different lawyer for each legal matter.
• Do your homework. Obtain a list of clients and ask them if they have been satisfied with the quality of the legal work they have received.
• Ask how the law firm handles conflicts of interest when the person or business with a case against you uses the same pre-paid plan.

LEGAL SOFTWARE AND ONLINE ADVICE

Small business owners can also gain expertise and reduce risks and costs by utilizing one of the legal software packages that are designed just for small businesses. McGraw-Hill offers the Small Business Lawyer, a CD-ROM that contains more than 320 customized legal forms and agreements that cover such things as power of attorney, partnerships, loans, real estate, leases, and the sale of business assets. Once the software is installed, the business owner enters information about his business just once, after which all of the forms can be generated using that information.

A CD-ROM from Nolo Press called Quicken Legal Business Pro 2006 includes the full text of five books published by Nolo, each targeted at the small business owner. The books, which are fully searchable, address hundreds of legal situations that are common to small businesses. The disc includes 140 forms and sample contracts and other useful legal documents.

Another potential source of legal forms and advice is the Internet. A number of Web sites exist that provide directories of attorneys, sources for legal research, samples of various types of forms and documents, and even free legal advice in chat rooms. For example, the American Bar Association site provides the addresses of state and local bar associations and lawyer referral services at http://www.abanet.org/legalservices/lris/directory.html. Martindale-Hubbell also sponsors an online "lawyer locator" at http://www.martindale.com/. The Web site www.uslaw.com offers overviews of the law as it affects small business and also provides a directory of affiliated lawyers.

But according to Carol Ebbinghouse in Searcher, small business owners should approach online legal services with caution. Obtaining legal advice online makes it difficult to establish a recognized attorney-client relationship, which may leave a small business without the protection of confidentiality and with no recourse in cases of malpractice or conflict of interest. Another potential pitfall is that online attorneys may not be licensed in the business owner's state. They may even be law students or otherwise lack the necessary experience or qualifications to provide good advice. For those who do use online legal services, Ebbinghouse recommends making sure the site is in compliance with Internet privacy and security protocols, reviewing all disclaimers and conditions, and double-checking the advice received.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Barrier, Michael. "The Maw of the Law." Success. October 2000.

Britton, Akissi. "Do You Need Legal Insurance?" Essence. December 2002.

Bell, David M.M. "Ethics and the Internet: In a Chaotic Dot-Com World, Internet Use Presents Many Practical, Ethical, and Regulatory Questions for Lawyers." California Bar Journal. July 2000.

Ebbinghouse, Carol. "Medical and Legal Misinformation on the Internet." Searcher. October 2000.

Mogharabi, Shabnam. "Justice for All: Small businesses sometimes can't afford full-time lawyers. Prepaid legal plans might help ease your legal fees." Pool & Spa News. 8 August 2005.

Poling, Charles. "Is Your Lawyer Doing Right for You?" New Mexico Business Journal. March 1997.

Prizinsky, David. "Alliance specializes in counsel for cost-conscious companies." Crain's Cleveland Business. 6 February 2006.

Shottenkirk, Jerry. "Ada-based Pre-Paid Legal continues to prosper." Journal Record. 23 March 2006.

                                   Hillstrom, Northern Lights

                                    updated by Magee, ECDI

The Legal Profession

Sources

Professionalism. Changes in the practice of law during the mid nineteenth century fit into a broader development of professionalism as a theme unifying different sorts of work. Just as training in law became more structured and admission to practice became more closely regulated, similar trends could be seen in other fields ranging from medicine to architecture. The overarching rise of professionalism was tied to the expansion of the economy, which provided new markets for various specialists, and also to the increasing prestige of science, which helped to explain why professionalization in medicine preceded comparable developments in law by a generation. The analogy of law to science that was so pervasive during the third quarter of the nineteenth century would later lose much of its appeal, but not until it had left a lasting imprint on the organization of the legal profession.

Langdell’s Law. The vanguard of professionalism in legal education was Harvard Law School, where Christopher Columbus Langdell assumed the new position of dean in September 1870. Langdell promptly revolutionized legal education, which even in the leading schools consisted of a one-year program of lectures and independent reading not markedly different from traditional apprenticeship arrangements between practitioners and novices. Langdell lengthened the Harvard program to two years in 1871 and to three years in 1876, which remains the standard at American law schools. For the first

time he required entrants to have a college degree or to pass a formidable examination. Langdell also developed an entirely new curriculum. He divided the field of law into sets of courses progressing from the basic to the advanced, requiring students to pass examinations in order to move forward. Throughout the United States, law students are still required in their first year to take courses in subjects that Langdell identified as fundamental, including contracts, torts, property, and civil procedure.

Formalism in the Classroom. Most important, Langdell developed a new method for teaching all subjects. Students would no longer be assigned to read the same sort of treatises and commentaries that practitioners used; no longer would they listen to professors deliver lectures explaining the law. Instead, Langdell introduced the “casebook,” consisting of the legal decisions that had contributed the most to the development of each field. Students probed for the principles underlying these cases in a Socratic dialogue conducted by the professor, who now became a full-time member of the university faculty rather than a part-time practitioner. Langdell published the first casebook in 1871. His approach was not an instant success—by the end of his first term only seven students remained in his class, and Boston University Law School was established in 1872 to offer a traditional education. Gradually, however, Langdell’s revolution came to dominate all instruction in American law schools.

Fields of Practice. The maturation of the economy provided new opportunities for lawyers to make money. Even in large cities, few attorneys practiced in lucrative specialties in 1850; the noteworthy exception had traditionally been marine insurance. Even leaders of the bar spent much of their time on conveyances of real estate, the drafting of wills and the administration of estates, and routine debt collection. Industrialization placed a premium on different fields such as patent law, torts, and eminent domain. In the more advanced stage of economic development that characterized the years after 1850 the problems of corporate finance and management became specialties broad enough to support a much larger number of commercial lawyers. Although railroads and other corporate clients affected practice in every city of significant size, the trend was most advanced on Wall Street, New York, where leaders of the bar focused on the issuance of stocks and bonds and on the designing of increasingly complex corporate structures. The appearance of law firms that would long remain influential illustrated the entrenchment taking place in the period. The forerunner of the firm of Cravath, Swaine and Moore moved to New York in 1854. The founders of Shearman and Sterling met in the practice of David Dudley Field, who represented the famous Wall Street operators Jim Fisk and Jay Gould. As one of the most distinguished practitioners in the country, Field confirmed young John W. Sterling’s sense that the era of the legal generalist was over and guided him into developing an expertise in the law of corporations.

Bar Associations. Concern over the involvement of attorneys in corrupt machinations prompted the founding of the first professional organizations. The Association of the Bar of the City of New York was organized in 1870 to combat the tainting of the law through the highly publicized battle over control of the Erie Railroad. Organizations quickly spread to other parts of the country; Chicago lawyers founded a bar association in 1874. By 1878 eight city and eight state bar associations had been founded in twelve states. In the same year, the American Bar Association was founded at the resort in Saratoga, New York, with a charge to “advance the science of jurisprudence… uphold the honor of the profession… and promote cordial intercourse among members of the American Bar.” Like farmers who were at the same time organizing to bargain collectively with railroads over shipping rates, and like laborers who were organizing to bargain collectively with employers over the conditions of work, attorneys saw themselves as organizing to deal collectively with corporations in asserting professional independence, including ethical standards. As one founder put it, the early bar associations were troubled that lawyers “do simply what their employers desire.” And like the organization of physicians, bar associations also sought to suppress competition, actively seeking to suppress informal training by apprenticeship and supporting the reforms in legal education spearheaded by Langdell.

Lincoln the Lawyer. The legal practice of Abraham Lincoln reflects the changes in the profession that affected lawyers in modest towns such as Springfield, Illinois. After serving as a junior partner first to the politically connected John Todd Stuart and then to Stephen T. Logan, Lincoln opened a firm with the younger William Herndon in 1844. As the head attorney of the firm he assumed responsibility for spending about ten weeks twice each year riding with Judge David Davis and other attorneys to each courthouse in the eleven thousand square miles of the Eighth Judicial District. (He would later appoint Davis to the U.S. Supreme Court.) In each town he handled a wide variety of cases, many of which were small disputes among neighbors. In 1851 he handled his first significant case for a railroad, enforcing a stock subscription by an investor unhappy about a change in the planned route of the road. By middecade Lincoln was spending much of his time on cases involving railroads. For example, he successfully represented the powerful Illinois Central in a suit brought by a county challenging the state’s authority to exempt the railroad from all local taxes. He also defended the builders of the first railroad bridge to cross the Mississippi River in a suit brought by the owners of a steamboat that crashed into a pier. Although one of the leading lawyers in Illinois, he encountered the exclusivity of nationally prominent attorneys when he became the local counsel in patent litigation over the mechanical reaper invented by Cyrus McCormick. “Why did you bring that d—d long armed Ape here,” Pittsburgh attorney Edwin Stanton asked the Philadelphia lawyer who headed McCormick’s legal team; “he does not know anything and can do you no good.” Snubbed, Lincoln dropped out of the litigation; as president of the United States seven years later, he appointed Stanton to the position of Secretary of War.

Sources

Maxwell Bloomfield, American Lawyers in a Changing Society, 1776–1876 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1976);

David Herbert Donald, Lincoln (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995);

Lawrence M. Friedman, A History of American Law, second edition (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1985);

Arthur E. Sutherland, The Law at Harvard: A History of Ideas and Men, 1817–1967 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967).

Legal Profession. Lawyers are disproportionately represented in the political branches of American government and hold a virtual monopoly over the judiciary. The extraordinary legal cast of the American Revolution first gave prominence to the idea that lawyers were the high priests of America's civic religion of law. Yet a populist ethic scorning them as money grubbers who mystified the law while profiting from the miseries of others has persisted.

The early bar responded to these concerns with a combination of formal legal education and self‐policing. Tapping Reeve in 1784 founded the Litchfield Law School in Connecticut, which trained more than one thousand lawyers before it closed in 1833. Yet most nineteenth‐century lawyers prepared for law practice by serving an apprenticeship with an established attorney or judge. Their reading included Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story's famous Commentaries, which first appeared in the 1830s.

Nevertheless, by 1870 the United States had thirty‐five law schools. Business corporations seeking specialized legal talent provided the impetus for some of this growth. Paul D. Cravath of New York City in the 1890s pioneered the factory system of law practice. Although lawyers in these large firms (five or more persons) were an infinitesimal percentage of all lawyers in the country, they garnered a disproportionate share of the financial rewards. During the twentieth century, the practice of law turned into a gigantic business, with more than 250 firms of one hundred or more lawyers commanding about 40 percent of the nation's total legal revenues.

The bar‐association movement also grew rapidly at the end of the nineteenth century. The American Bar Association (ABA), founded in 1878 by Judge Simeon E. Baldwin, advocated higher standards for practitioners. The ABA and local associations attempted to elevate quality by limiting access, especially of the foreign born, women, and racial minorities.

Despite opposition, however, all of these groups gradually joined the profession. Night law schools accommodated the rising tide of immigrants and other daytime workers seeking a career at the bar. Women's exclusion from the profession continued longer because the men who dominated it believed women's proper place was in the home, a cultural bias sustained by the Supreme Court in Bradwell v. Illinois (1873). By 1997, however, women constituted about 24 percent of all lawyers, up from 2.5 percent in 1950, and about half of all law school graduates. The number of African American lawyers also increased, though less dramatically. In 1997, when African Americans constituted 12 percent of the population, they represented about 7 percent of law graduates but only 3 percent of the bar. Women and all minorities remained distinctly under‐represented as partners in large law firms at the end of the twentieth century.

Dean Christopher Columbus Langdell of Harvard Law School introduced in the 1870s the most enduring reforms in legal education. Langdell's “scientific” method involved formal entrance requirements, the case method of teaching, core subjects, large libraries filled with state and national reports, and law reviews edited by law students.

Langdell's method survived, but his assumptions came under attack, first from advocates of “sociological jurisprudence,” including Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. and Louis Brandeis, and then in the 1930s and 1940s from the Legal Realists, who insisted on measuring the law's success by its social consequences rather than its scientific logic. Some of the Realists, such as Jerome Frank, moved into the New Deal as lawyers, where they became the vanguard of a new segment of the profession—the government lawyers—and the regulators of consumer safety, occupational health, civil rights, and environmental matters.

This commitment to law as an instrument of social policy produced a surge in the number of lawyers. In 1960 there were 286,000 lawyers in the United States; in 1997 the number was almost 1 million, or roughly one lawyer for every 250 people, a ratio unrivaled in American history and in the rest of the world. The nation's 175 law schools continued to turn out many thousands more each year. Moreover, the Supreme Court's decision in Bates v. State Bar of Arizona (1977)—that bar‐association codes against lawyer advertising violated lawyers' First Amendment rights to commercial free speech—opened the legal market to more competition.

As the twentieth century ended, the American legal profession was more diverse, more influential, and more embedded in popular consciousness than ever before. As interest in the profession soared, however, these high priests of America's civic religion frequently exhibited feet of clay. The reputational ranking of lawyers sank along with President Richard M. Nixon and his lawyer‐laden staff during the Watergate crisis and in the aftermath of celebrity cases such as the 1995 murder trial of the football star O.J. Simpson. Lawyers, it sometimes seemed, had become the profession that Americans loved to hate but could not live without.
See also Federal Government, Judicial Branch; Jurisprudence; New Deal Era, The; Professionalization; Shaw, Lemuel.

Bibliography

Wayne K. Hobson , The American Legal Profession and the Organizational Society, 1890–1930, 1986.
Peter Irons , New Deal Lawyers, 1982.
Robert Stevens , Law School: Legal Education in America from the 1850s to the 1980s, 1983.
Kermit L. Hall , The Magic Mirror: Law in American History, 1989.
Jennifer L. Pierce , Gender Trials: Emotional Lives in Contemporary Law Firms, 1995.
American Bar Association , Miles to Go: Progress of Minorities in the Legal Profession, 1998.

Kermit L. Hall

The Legal Profession

Law School Enrollment

In 1990 there were 127,261 students enrolled in American Bar Association-approved law schools. This number increased to 129,397 in 1995, but dropped to 125,627 by 1998-1999. Despite the decline in total law school enrollment, the number of women in law programs rose consistently throughout the decade. In 1990 there were 54,097 women (43 percent) enrolled in 175 law schools; by 1998 the figure increased to 57,952 (46 percent) in 181 programs. The number of minority students also rose. In 1990 blacks, Hispanies, Asian/Pacific Islanders, Native Americans, and Puerto Ricans constituted 14 percent (17,330) of law students. By 1998 minority enrollment increased to an historic high of 25,266 or just over 20 percent. The attrition rate among law students increased slightly during the decade, the vast majority of whom quit in their first year. A slightly higher percentage of men dropped out than women—in 1990, 3,187 male and 2,245 female students quit; in 1997, 3,418 men and 2,469 women dropped out.

Degrees and Bar Admissions

The number of Juris Doctorate degrees awarded increased from 36,385 in 1990 to 39,455 in 1998. Women received 42 percent (15,345) of these degrees in 1990 and 45 percent (17,662) in 1998. Minorities awarded law degrees also increased from 4,128 in 1990 to 7,754 in 1998. Bar admissions rose from 47,174 in 1989-1990 to 57,875 in 1994, but they declined slightly to 56,629 in 1996.

LAW SCHOOL ENROLLMENT, NUMBER OF LAW SCHOOLS, AND BAR ADMISSIONS (1990-1999)

Source:

American Bar Association

Earnings

In the early 1990s law firms showed a decline in profits earned. During the second half of the decade, however, gross revenues and profits per partner increased. In 1999 the median salary for first-year associates ranged from $51,000 in firms of 225 attorneys or fewer to $85,000 in firms ot 251 attorneys or more, with a first-year median of $70,000. Salaries for entry-level attorneys in larger firms and lawyers with expertise in specialized fields showed a noticeable increase during the decade. The average entry-level income for attorneys in larger New York firms ranged between $85,000 and $90,000. In some firms, first-year associates earned more than $100,000. The earnings of lawyers employed by state and federal agencies increased, but at a slower rate than in the private sector. By the end of the decade the salaries of entry-level county prosecutors averaged between $30,000 and $50,000. In 1999 the average income for State Attorneys General was between $55,000 and $150,000; U.S. attorneys made $118,400; federal public defenders ranged between $50,000 and $118,400; and public defenders at the county level could expect between $30,000 and $150,000.

MEDIAN COMPENSATION FOR
LAWYERS IN PRIVATE FIRMS

Source:

American Bar Association

Still Behind

The salaries and advancement of minorities and women remained lower than the national average. Only half of female associates and fewer than one third (30.8 percent) of minorities in large law firms perceived opportunities to advance to partnership as equitable. In smaller firms about 31 percent of female associates and 43 percent of minority associates perceived the criteria for advancement as being applied fairly. Minority partners in major law firms accounted for 2.95 percent; women accounted for 14.21 percent. Although minorities and women were underrepresented among partnerships, the figures documented a continuing, albeit small, increase from the early 1990s.

Sources:

ABA Network, American Bur Association, Internet website.

Amar Bhutia, "Lawyers Earnings Increase," The Federal Lawyer, 45 (August 1998): 19-20.

Margaret Cr nin Fisk, "Most Lawyers Benefit From Boom," National Law Journal, 21 (14 June 1999): B7-B15.

National Association of Law Placement, Perceptions of Partnership: The Allure and Accessibility of the Brass Ring (NALP Foundation for Research & Education, 1999).

LEGAL SERVICES

The Great Society and Legal Assistance

The Office of Economic Opportunity began to fund lawyers for poor people in 1965. While legal-aid programs already existed in many cities, they were poorly funded and often unable to meet requests for help. The federally funded legal-services programs were designed to coordinate the provision of legal aid and to help the poor by working for social change through law. They also represented the poor in their ordinary legal troubles, such as conflict with landlords or family problems. The efforts of legal service attorneys to benefit the poor were extremely controversial. Congress regularly considered cutting back the cases that the attorneys could take.

The California Story

California legal-services attorneys, particularly the California Rural Legal Assistance (CRLA) program, brought many of the lawsuits that expanded legal protections for poor people. The CRLA also tried to work with farmworkers for better conditions in agricultural labor. They worked extensively with Cesar Chavez, a leading organizer of the United Farmworkers' Organization. Organizing for agricultural laborers was extremely controversial because of the political power of California farm owners. The CRLA was therefore the target of much criticism. The CRLA was successful in challenging cuts to public medical care in California and in challenging the use of alien farm laborers in California. In 1970 Gov. Ronald Reagan vetoed appropriation of $1.8 million to the CRLA from the federal government because he objected to the program. He charged it with misuse of funds.

Response

In response to Governor Reagan's complaints President Richard Nixon appointed a commission to investigate the CRLA in January of 1971. In June the Office of Economic Opportunity made the report public, calling Governor Reagan's charges "unfounded, without merit, unfair and irresponsible." Under pressure from President Nixon, Governor Reagan reinstated the CRLA's funds. But the face-off had received national attention and provided the pretext for congressional attempts to reorganize the Legal Services Program.

Limits on Work

In 1974 Congress and President Nixon enacted limits on what legal-services attorneys could do. They could no longer represent undocumented workers, which specifically impacted California Rural Legal Assistance. Nor could they be involved in any school desegregation or abortion cases. They also could not organize low-income people or participate in demonstrations.

Politics and Organization

Congress also reorganized the Legal Services Program into the Legal Services Corporation (LSC). Sponsored in part by the American Bar Association, the reorganization was an attempt to insulate legal assistance from the dismantling of antipoverty programs that President Nixon began in the 1970s. The reorganization also gained support from those who wanted to limit the work of legal-services attorneys. They halted funding designed to meet poor communities' needs. Instead, the LSC distributed legal aid money on a per capita basis. Legal-services programs now subsidized routine legal services for poor people rather than seeking to act as a source of social change.

Source:

Mark Kessler, Legal Services for the Poor (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1987).

LEGALESE. An informal, usually pejorative term for language that is typical of lawyers or that contains too much legal terminology. ‘“It is highly probable, and more likely than not in the light of [the TV series] ‘ L. A. Law's’ nationwide popularity, that one or more jurors viewed this segment and was impressed by or even discussed same among themselves,” he argued in his best legalese’ (‘Role Models for Attorneys?’, International Herald Tribune, 11 May 1990). See -ESE, JARGON, LAW FRENCH, LEGAL USAGE, REGISTER.

LEGALESE

Slang; technical jargon used by attorneys that is often beyond the comprehension of the nonlawyer.

States enact "plain English" laws that require the translation of legalese into everyday language to permit consumers to understand thei insurance policies, deeds, mortgages, leases, credit card financing agreements, and other legal documents.

le·gal·ese / ˌlēgəˈlēz; -ˈlēs/ • n. inf. , often derog. the formal and technical language of legal documents that is often hard to understand.

legalese •Achinese, Ambonese, appease, Assamese, Balinese, Belize, Beninese, Bernese, bêtise, Bhutanese, breeze, Burmese, Cantonese, Castries, cerise, cheese, chemise, Chinese, Cingalese, Cleese, Congolese, Denise, Dodecanese, ease, éminence grise, expertise, Faroese, freeze, Fries, frieze, Gabonese, Genoese, Goanese, Guyanese, he's, Japanese, Javanese, jeez, journalese, Kanarese, Keys, Lebanese, lees, legalese, Louise, Macanese, Madurese, Maltese, marquise, Milanese, Nepalese, Nipponese, officialese, overseas, pease, Pekinese, Peloponnese, Piedmontese, please, Portuguese, Pyrenees, reprise, Rwandese, seise, seize, Senegalese, she's, Siamese, Sienese, Sikkimese, Sinhalese, sleaze, sneeze, squeeze, Stockton-on-Tees, Sudanese, Sundanese, Surinamese, Tabriz, Taiwanese, tease, Tees, telegraphese, these, Timorese, Togolese, trapeze, valise, Viennese, Vietnamese, vocalese, wheeze •superficies • Héloïse • Averroës •rabies • pubes • Maccabees •headcheese