Accounting Ratio Analyses of Inequality of Minority Lawyers

2018 ◽  
Vol 37 (2) ◽  
pp. 237-264
Author(s):  
KiKyung Song ◽  
EunYoung Whang ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Human Capital ◽  
Legal Profession ◽  
Standard Errors ◽  
Law Firms ◽  
Controversial Issues ◽  
Labor Discrimination ◽  
Compensation Gap ◽  
International Transactions ◽  
Diversity In The Workplace

With the expansion of clientele’s demographics and international transactions, many law firms began to open doors to non-mainstreamers—minority lawyers to join the legal workforce. Decades have passed and the inequality in compensation between minority and non-minority attorneys is still one of the most controversial issues in the legal profession. Based on human capital and labor discrimination theory, we examine the productivity and compensation differences between minority attorneys and non-minority counterparts. The sample consists of 554 firm-year observations of the 200 largest U.S law firms from 2013 to 2016. We use OLS with clustered standard errors by year. We find minority partners are more likely to provide relatively routine and template-based services, which do not command fee premium, which results in low productivity of minority partners. We find that minority partners are compensated less than their non-minority counterparts after controlling for productivity. This paper aids in the understanding of diversity in the workplace and the effect of diversity on a firms’ productivity and the type of services to provide. Also, this paper has implications on the compensation gap between minorities and their non-minority counterparts.

scholarly journals AI-enabled business models in legal services: from traditional law firms to next-generation law companies?

2020 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 27-46 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Armour ◽  
Mari Sako
Keyword(s):  
Business Model ◽  
Business Models ◽  
Legal Profession ◽  
Law Firms ◽  
Legal Services ◽  
Law Firm ◽  
Corporate Form ◽  
New Business ◽  
Employee Incentives ◽  
New Business Models

Abstract What will happen to law firms and the legal profession when the use of artificial intelligence (AI) becomes prevalent in legal services? We address this question by considering three related levels of analysis: tasks, business models, and organizations. First, we review AI’s technical capabilities in relation to tasks, to identify contexts where it is likely to replace or augment humans. AI is capable of doing some, but not all, legal tasks better than lawyers and is augmented by multidisciplinary human inputs. Second, we identify new business models for creating value in legal services by applying AI. These differ from law firms’ traditional legal advisory business model, because they require technological (non-human) assets and multidisciplinary human inputs. Third, we analyze the organizational structure that complements the old and new business models: the professional partnership (P2) is well-adapted to delivering the legal advisory business model, but the centralized management, access to outside capital, and employee incentives offered by the corporate form appear better to complement the new AI-enabled business models. Some law firms are experimenting with pursuing new and old business models in parallel. However, differences in complements create conflicts when business models are combined. These conflicts are partially externalized via contracting and segregated and realigned via vertical integration. Our analysis suggests that law firm experimentation with aligning different business models to distinct organizational entities, along with ethical concerns, will affect the extent to which the legal profession will become ‘hybrid professionals’.

Client-Related Factors and Collaboration Between Human Assets

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
John K. Mawdsley ◽  
Philipp Meyer-Doyle ◽  
Olivier Chatain
Keyword(s):  
Human Capital ◽  
Professional Service ◽  
Law Firms ◽  
Service Firms ◽  
Professional Service Firms ◽  
Related Factors ◽  
Firm Level ◽  
Individual Level ◽  
Knowledge Intensive ◽  
The Individual

Collaborations between individuals in firms have important implications for the development of relational and human capital. In knowledge-intensive contexts where collaborations are formed to deliver services to clients, collaboration decisions can involve nontrivial tradeoffs between short-term and long-term benefits: individuals and firms must carefully manage the tradeoffs between leveraging existing relational and human capital for the reliable performance of repeat collaboration and creating new relational and human capital through new collaboration. Building from the premise that servicing clients is central to collaboration decisions in human asset–intensive firms, we examine how client-related factors shape collaboration decisions among lawyers (partners) in UK law firms providing M&A legal advisory services. We focus on three key client-related dimensions that we predict govern collaboration decisions: the depth of individual- and firm-level relationships with the focal client, key client attributes that reflect the client’s status and its use of different firms to undertake its outsourced work, and client-driven individual- and firm-level resource constraint. Our empirical findings support our proposition that client-related factors influence the pattern of collaborations between individuals in firms. We also reveal how client-related factors at the individual level can have opposite effects on collaboration decisions from those at the firm level. Overall, our findings contribute to research on relational capital, strategic human capital, team formation, professional service firms, and the microfoundations of strategy.

Free Justice

Free Justice ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 24-56
Author(s):  
Sara Mayeux
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Legal Profession ◽  
Public Prosecutor ◽  
Law Firms ◽  
Public Defender ◽  
Legal Aid ◽  
Criminal Courts ◽  
The Public ◽  
Indigent Defense ◽  
Private Charity

This chapter describes Progressive Era debates within the legal profession over proposals to establish a “public defender” in the criminal courts—a public official who would represent criminal defendants and counterbalance the public prosecutor. It describes different versions of the public defender idea, as developed by California lawyer Clara Foltz, New York lawyer Mayer Goldman, and the prominent Massachusetts lawyer Reginald Heber Smith, author of Justice and the Poor. Leaders of the bar, often affiliated with corporate law firms, expressed concerns that the public defender represented a step towards socialization of the legal profession. Instead, they preferred to handle indigent defense and other forms of legal aid through private charity. In 1917, New York lawyers rejected proposals for a government-controlled public defender and instead established a criminal branch of the Legal Aid Society.

Towards an integrated framework of professional partnership performance: The role of formal governance and strategic planning

2017 ◽  
Vol 70 (11) ◽  
pp. 1388-1414 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michel W Lander ◽  
Pursey PMAR Heugens ◽  
J (Hans) van Oosterhout
Keyword(s):  
Human Capital ◽  
Strategic Planning ◽  
Theoretical Framework ◽  
Conventional Wisdom ◽  
Law Firms ◽  
Objective Data ◽  
Mediating Mechanisms ◽  
Attraction And Retention ◽  
Critical Resources

Conventional wisdom identifies human capital and organizational reputation as the critical resources explaining professional partnership (PP) performance. PPs have increasingly adopted organizational practices like strategic planning and formal governance, however, which have long been alien in highly professionalized contexts. In order to test the influence of both these classic resources and the newly adopted practices on PP performance, as well as the mediating mechanisms— that is, client attraction and retention as well as organizational efficiency—through which this influence is channeled, we develop an integrated theoretical framework of PP performance. We test the resulting hypotheses using survey and objective data collected on 196 Dutch law firms. Our findings provide new insights into the drivers of PP performance and the complex interrelationships between PP resources and newly adopted practices.

Anatomy of a Counter-Bar Association: The Chicago Council of Lawyers

1979 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
pp. 501-541 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Powell
Keyword(s):  
Legal Profession ◽  
Legal Services ◽  
Controversial Issues ◽  
Professional Authority ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Media ◽  
Successful Establishment ◽  
Bar Association ◽  
The 1960S

There have been few successful attempts in the history of the organized bar since 1870 to establish alternative bar groups that challenge the dominance of the large comprehensive local and state bar associations over the representation of lawyers' interests. Founded in 1969, a product of the social ferment of the 1960s, the Chicago Council of Lawyers provides an example of one such attempt. This paper examines the conditions under which a reform-oriented counter-bar association is likely to arise, the factors that permitted its successful establishment in Chicago, and the functions it serves within the legal profession as an alternative to the Chicago Bar Association.While the violence surrounding the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago may have sparked the formation of an alternative bar association, it was intraprofessional matters that deeply concerned the founders of the Council particularly the performance of the organized bar in providing legal services to the poor and in improving the quality of the judiciary. Within the legal profession itself there was also a striking disjunction between the age of the leadership of the bar and of the numerous young lawyers who flooded in-to the bar in the 1960s. Preexisting networks of young activist lawyers greatly facilitated organizational formation.As a reformist group with a small and relatively homogeneous membership, and lacking strong ties to powerful institutions, the Council can afford to take strong stances on controversial issues. By aggressively supporting positions at odds with those of the more established bar associations, and thus providing the media, the public, and legislators with an alternative viewpoint, the Council contributes to shattering the myth of a unified profession and to the demystification of professional authority.

Current Demographics in Large Corporate Law Firms in South Africa

2015 ◽  
Vol 8 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 174-181 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan Klaaren
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Social Dynamics ◽  
Legal Profession ◽  
White Men ◽  
Corporate Law ◽  
African Women ◽  
Law Firms ◽  
Race And Gender ◽  
Legal Professionals ◽  
And Gender

By contrast with the judges and the advocates, the issue of race and gender representivity in the attorneys segment of the legal profession generally and in large corporate law firms specifically has not received significant attention, in part due to the lack of accurate statistics and a thin research tradition. Addressing the gap, a 2013 survey investigated the demographics of legal professionals in large corporate law firms in South Africa. The chief finding of the survey is that South Africa’s major corporate law firms are still dominated by white men, especially in their upper echelons. Further, nearly half of the African women professionally employed in large corporate law firms (48.1%) are candidate attorneys, which is to say non-admitted legal professionals. These findings are consistent with the few earlier studies that have been conducted and indicate the need for further detailed research into the social dynamics of the African legal profession.

The re-landscaping of the legal profession: Large law firms and professional re-regulation

2011 ◽  
Vol 59 (4) ◽  
pp. 507-529 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Flood
Keyword(s):  
Self Regulation ◽  
Legal Profession ◽  
Law Firms ◽  
Legal Services ◽  
Legal Market ◽  
The Uk ◽  
City Of London ◽  
Global Law ◽  
The City ◽  
The Eu

The size and scope of global law firms has made them difficult to encompass within a single regulatory jurisdiction. As the UK government sought to take control of the legal profession and market by removing self-regulation and introducing external regulation under the Legal Services Act, the large law firms were able to countermand the new regime. Through a combination of associations like CityUK, the City of London Law Society, as well as through individual firms, large law firms lobbied successfully to reinstate a new form of self-regulation known as AIR. The elites of the legal profession constructed a new logic of professionalism that accorded with the firms’ ideologies and government’s market-oriented objectives. Further attempts to consolidate their position at the EU and at the GATS levels are still in negotiation. Despite the legal market shifting to a more diffuse combination of actors, of which lawyers are only a segment, elite law firms have apparently strengthened their hold.

“Heard It Through the Grapevine”: Chinese Walls and Former Client Confidentiality in Law Firms

2000 ◽  
Vol 59 (2) ◽  
pp. 370-389
Author(s):  
Harry Mcvea
Keyword(s):  
Public Policy ◽  
Legal Profession ◽  
Law Firms ◽  
Law Firm ◽  
Policy Issues ◽  
The Public ◽  
House Of Lords ◽  
The Impact

The article addresses the public policy issues associated with former client confidentiality and law firm mergers and, in the light of these, it examines the claim, endorsed by City firms and others, that market-based solutions, such as Chinese walls, promote the interests of the profession without imperiling the interests of justice. The House of Lords' ruling in Prince Jefri BolkiahV. KPMG and Laddie J's interpretation of it in YoungV. Robson Rhodes are analysed with the aim of assessing the impact of both decisions on the above claim and their consequences for the legal profession generally.

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