Profit and the Practice of Law: What's Happened to the Legal Profession

Rating:
Summary: Outstanding reflection on the "state of the profession"
Review: Many commentators have noted a sea change in the standards and practices of the legal profession over the last thirty years. There is, of course, a temptation for us all to hark back to an imagined golden age when we were young. However, there is widespread agreement among commentators on legal ethics that there has been a paradigm shift in the way lawyers see their job. This is usually explained as a metamorphosis of lawyers from legal professionals into legal businessmen.

Many authors have commented on this but few are as well placed to do so as Michael Trotter. He has served a working lifetime in an major Atlanta commercial law firm. He offers detailed chapter and verse for the suspicions that many of us intuitively felt but could not pin down. Trotter is unusual in that he has taken time out from the drudgery of racking up billable hours to reflect on what is happening to the legal profession and what that means for the profession and society.

For a man who has spent most of his life in the minutiae of clients' affairs, he has remarkable detachment and insight. I don't propose to lay out his thesis in depth but simply say that I found his comments profoundly perceptive and disturbing. Everything that he says about the changes in the practice of law in the United States, we too have seen in Britain. Again, the negative consequences of the transition of law firms from groupings of men of affairs and pillars of the community into legal technicians and businessmen, we have also seen in Britain.

Trotter explains how the single-minded pursuit of profit has a tremendous knock on effect. It reaches deep into the ways in which law is practiced and the way the public perceives the profession. The consequences are not just cosmetic but have profound consequences for access to justice, maintenance of professional standards, and the self-esteem of lawyers.

This book is strongly commended to all lawyers and is readily accessible to the lay reader.