November 17, 2005

Big changes in character of legal profession

By Pat Vaughan Tremmel

Over the last quarter of the 20th century, the legal profession became much more concerned about business than solving everyday problems of people’s lives, according to a new book “Urban Lawyers: the New Social Structure of the Bar” (University of Chicago Press, 2005).

“The whole character of the legal profession has changed,” concludes co-author John P. Heinz, Owen L. Coon Professor of Law and professor of sociology.

In their first big look at Chicago’s legal profession, Heinz and University of Chicago Professor Edward O. Laumann found that lawyers serving corporate clients and those working for individuals and small businesses inhabited two distinct hemispheres. The lawyers from the two hemispheres seldom, if ever, crossed the equator, the researchers concluded from their 1975 survey of Chicago lawyers.

The new book, “Urban Lawyers,” is based on another American Bar Foundation survey conducted in 1994/95, 20 years later. The book concludes that the divide between the two sets of lawyers continues to widen -- to an extent that the two-hemispheres metaphor doesn’t even work any more.

The two parts are distinguished by substantial differences in socioeconomic and ethno-religious backgrounds, education credentials, social networks, prestige and incomes.

“In 1975, the two-hemispheres metaphor was appropriate, because the two sets of lawyers were roughly the same size,” says Heinz.

“But by the mid-1990s the corporate area of practice had become more than twice as big as the personal and small business sector of Chicago lawyers. And the difference between those making the most and the least money is striking. Income for those doing corporate work at the big firms is going like gangbusters, while it is declining for those in solo practice.”

The “Urban Lawyers” research not only compares the 1975 and 1995 data to illustrate the dramatic transformation of the Chicago bar that took place at the end of the 20th century, it also draws on leading research that offers a sweeping look at the legal profession as a whole, going back to “the golden age” associated with stable partnerships with lifetime tenure.

The book offers a colorful picture of American lawyers, who for much of the 20th century were disproportionately likely to be white, male, Protestant, of northern European ancestry and from the upper reaches of society. In 1975, the legal profession still was relatively stable, the data shows, but it was on the brink of rapid change. The hierarchies within the profession that had evolved since the middle of the 19th century were about to shift with the entry of large numbers of women and minorities.