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Law School Admissions Essays: Why Do I Want to Be a Lawyer?

Published: Mar 31, 2009

A less obvious, more common mistake is to write about how you want to help people. The fact is that most law school graduates, especially from the top schools, go on to work in the private sector. Law school admissions officers are not out to judge the moral value of your career intentions, particularly because they know that people often change their minds. They're well aware that most of their graduates will go on to seek financially rewarding careers. Therefore, applicants who mention clichis about wanting to "improve society" usually sound disingenuous.

Focusing on Specific Legal Areas

If you have a specific goal, such as working for a particular disadvantaged group that lacks advocates, then the situation is different: It's always good to showcase a unique, focused commitment. Even better would be if you had a track record of community service to back up your objectives. For example, you may have worked with handicapped people for several years, and this exposed you to certain injustices that you want to correct. The same approach would work for topics that are not about public service. For example, this applicant describes his background in science and connects this to his current interests in intellectual property law. He recognizes that his unusual background is a strength rather than a liability. His unique reasons for attending law school are clearly grounded in relevant experience and thoughtful consideration.

Personal Interests

Discussing specific areas of law is a surefire way to demonstrate a mature commitment to the study of law. However, admissions officers certainly do not expect this level of decisiveness. Another way to show your reasons for pursuing law is to tie your interest to personal qualities or skills. This applicant shows that her interest in law is grounded in her willingness to seek "justice at any cost." What's important is not that she be the only person with this conviction, because that would not be possible. Instead, the uniqueness comes through her personal details, the evidence that she provides to back up her principled nature.

Brushes With the Law

Some people will discover their interest in law through an unplanned encounter. This applicant describes her involvement in an Equal Employment Opportunity suit, then ties this in with her interest in environmental law. The result is an essay that provides two specific details: first, a concrete event that demonstrates her exposure to law, and second, a distinct field of law for which she has special qualifications to pursue.

This essay focuses even more explicitly on the role that law and lawyers have played in the applicant's life. Though the details of the essay still center on the applicant's background, he uses past encounters with the law to define his current objectives.

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Lawyers, the Legal Profession & Access to Justice in the United States: A Brief History

by Robert W. Gordon

In no profession is the gulf greater between ideals and practices than it is for lawyers. Ideally, justice is a universal good: the law protects equally the rights of the rich and the poor, the giant corporation and the small business, the innocent and the criminal accused. The ethical imperative that lawyers must zealously serve the interests of their clients can be justified, and reconciled with the goal of universal justice, only if all other affected parties (including the clients’ adversaries) will be competently represented as well. In practice, of course, access to the complex and expensive procedures of law and the services of lawyers is largely determined by clients’ ability to pay: the major share of legal services goes to business entities and wealthy people. The lawyers who enjoy the greatest professional success and prestige do most of their work on behalf of the rich and powerful. 1

This essay examines the history of access to justice — chiefly civil justice, with a brief note on criminal defense — and the role of lawyers and organized legal professions in promoting and restricting that access. Traditionally, access to justice has meant at minimum the effective capacity to bring claims to a court, or to defend oneself against such claims. Although many courts allow parties to represent themselves, it is clear that effective access usually requires the services of a competent lawyer, since lawyers hold the monopoly of rights of practice in courts and the skills and experience that accrue from that practice. The costs of litigation, however, are very high — in court costs, administrative costs, witness fees, and lawyers’ fees — so much so that even middle-class parties are foreclosed from using the courts for any but routine transactions unless they can tap into financing from some other source, such as contingent fees and attorney-fee awards paid by the adverse party, or state-subsidized legal services.

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In the modern world, access to justice requires more than the capacity to litigate in courts. It requires help with navigating the mazes of bureaucratic government and filling out its forms, and with contesting adverse government actions. It requires help in planning for major life events, like founding a business, adopting a child, or divorcing a spouse. It requires effective assistance with challenging adverse actions of business corporations or professionals, say, as employees or customers. It requires access to powerful decision-makers, or agents in a position to influence them. Lawyers are not exclusive providers of such out-of-court services — they have to compete with accountants, financial consultants, and lobbyists, among others — but they tend to dominate.

In the last century, legal professions, governments, and charitable providers have taken small, partial steps to provide access to legal processes and legal advice to people who could not otherwise afford them. By doing so, they have inched closer to the ideals of universal justice. They have also, on occasion, acted to restrict access to law by the poor and powerless. Despite inspiring rhetoric — and more inspiring models and exemplars — that American lawyers use to trumpet their commitment to equal justice for all, they have generally served their own interests before those of the public, in particular the poor and economically struggling. They serve best the rich and powerful, serve some middle-class clients and interests to the extent that it generates adequate fees, and, with notable exceptions, either serve minimally or not at all virtually everyone else.

Before 1900, mentions in Anglo-American legal records of aid to the poor are scattered. Most of the references are to judges who appointed counsel to poor clients or to lawyers who voluntarily took their cases.

Medieval canon law was full of injunctions to lawyers to serve persons too poor to pay their fees, and “persons of humble status” were frequent enough litigants to suggest that some lawyers did. 2 Common lawyers also recognized some duties to the poor, codified in statute in 1495, when

Parliament provided . . . that poor persons could petition to plead in forma pauperis in all courts of record without the payment of any court fees, and provided further that the Chancellor and Justices should assign to such poor persons attorneys and learned counsel who should give their counsels without taking any reward. 3

Lawyers’ fees in medieval times were not high per case (most serjeants-at-law made their serious money via retainers), but English law was already so technical that no one could navigate pleading rules without a lawyer. Scattered reports refer to poor litigants represented by appointed or volunteer counsel: there is no way to know how frequently. It is likely that most poor persons’ disputes were heard in more informal courts like the Court of Requests, or manorial or borough courts. Before the early 18th century, middle-class litigants like tradesmen and well-off farmers appeared frequently in common-law courts. But as long ago as the mid-18th century, lawyers’ fees and court costs had escalated above even most middle-class pocketbooks. 4

Until the mid-18th century, a criminal accused was not allowed a lawyer to contest the facts of the cases against him, but had to conduct his own defense. This began to change around the mid-18th century, when lawyers were permitted, but without pay.

With respect to criminal defense, reflecting the colonists’ experience on the receiving end of imperial prosecution, the new republic definitively rejected earlier English practice by providing federal and state constitutional rights to counsel in criminal cases. They provided no funding to support the right, but in serious felony cases, especially for murder, courts would often appoint prominent lawyers to defend without pay. They often welcomed the chance for publicity in notorious trials.

Most small claims for civil justice in the earlier 19th century were pursued without lawyers in local informal tribunals, like justice of the peace courts or county courts. Anyone, including wives, minors, and slaves, could come under the jurisdiction of these courts, which were regulatory agencies and enforcers of local laws as well as dispute-settlers. Yet even in regular trial and appellate courts, the reports show many cases with lawyers litigating relatively small sums like $50 to $100. Entry barriers to the profession were almost nil in most states, so litigants could have the benefit of low-cost advice.

Subsidized advice in the United States to help poor people deal with social and legal problems began with the Working Women’s Protective Union in 1863 in New York, which helped workers collect fraudulently withheld wages. The union’s example gradually spread to other cities. Staffed, at first, mostly by volunteer women nonlawyers, the Chicago Protective Agency for Women and Children expanded the model. By 1905, it had a paid staff and was handling four thousand cases. The Protective Agency also brought wage claims, but specialized in helping victims of domestic violence, who were often ignored by courts. Around the same time, the Chicago Bureau of Justice was founded. Its clients were mostly poor people with small debts to tradesmen, landlords, and mortgage lenders. Like the Protective Agency, it distrusted the formal legal system: it saw many judges as corrupt and the lower bar as incompetent. The two Chicago organizations merged in 1905 to form the Legal Aid Society of Chicago. 5

New York City opened its own Legal Aid Society in 1900, largely to aid floods of newly arrived Jewish immigrants. The society grew out of an earlier bureau giving legal advice to German immigrants. Unlike the women’s protective unions, New York Legal Aid was mostly staffed by lawyers and defined its work as strictly legal rather than social work. But it was also strongly paternalistic, seeking to educate in American values those whom the lawyers saw as quarrelsome litigious Jews. It generally sought only money damages for clients rather than seeking broader solutions to their family problems, and refused to act if defendants had no assets.

In the early-20th-century wave of professionalization, social work emerged as a recognized credentialed profession. Lawyers, spearheaded by new national and local bar associations, sought to raise their own professional standards with new educational and bar exam requirements. Among lawyers, Reginald Heber Smith of Boston became the most prominent advocate for legal aid with his Carnegie Foundation Report on Justice and the Poor (1919), an indictment of unequal access to justice that was the leading manifesto for the legal-aid movement for the rest of the century. 6 Smith maintained that providing lawyers for the poor and people of moderate means was an elementary requirement of justice, which the legal profession had an obligation to supply rather than leave to charity.

His report ignored the existence of substantial women’s legal-aid organizations. He and his disciples fought a running battle with the social workers, insisting that law was a masculine sphere in which clients could exercise legal rights only with the help of a trained lawyer. Eventually, these quarrels were resolved by compromise, with the recognition that many poor clients’ problems could not be addressed solely by means of the law. Smith estimated in 1919 that about $600,000 would suffice to fund adequate legal-aid services in the nation’s cities — a contribution of $5 per lawyer — but complained that lawyers and their guilds were mostly indifferent to the responsibility to supply it.

Some bar leaders continued to promote legal aid, but the rank-and-file remained apathetic and sometimes actively hostile. Until the mid-1960s, the American Bar Association (ABA) condemned as socialism the idea of state-funded — as opposed to bar- and charity-funded — civil legal services, just as the American Medical Association had condemned Medicare. Most urban legal-aid programs remained severely underfunded, unable to accept most potential clients, and prohibited from helping clients divorce or go bankrupt for fear of offending charitable funders. These programs were averse to taking adversarial stances against landlords or businesses, favoring conciliation rather than the vindication of rights. 7

The landscape changed in 1965 with the funding of the Office of Equal Opportunity Legal Services Program (since reorganized as the Legal Services Corporation, or LSC) as a component of Lyndon B. Johnson’s war on poverty. In a major shift of policy, national bar leaders at the ABA supported this program at the time and have since become its stalwart defenders against multiple political attacks. Federal services expanded the total national legal aid budget from under $5 million per year to $321 million in 1980–1981.

Program lawyers, including many top graduates of elite law schools, saw a much more ambitious role for the LSC than traditional legal aid. Rather than simply trying to help clients solve their problems one by one, they favored bringing strategic test-case suits before sympathetic liberal federal judges, and helping client groups like welfare recipients to form organizations capable of making their own demands. Their most controversial efforts were the work of program-funded California Rural Legal Assistance lawyers for Cesar Chavez’s farmworkers and program lawyers’ support for the militant National Welfare Rights Organization, which lobbied for a right to universal basic income.

The lawyers made fierce enemies among those interests that their clients sued. These included Governor Ronald Reagan of California (as president, he tried to abolish the program in 1981, and succeeded in cutting its budget by 25 percent); local and national welfare officials; real-estate interests targeted by new tenants’ organizations; established city patronage machines; and — not least — local lawyers and bar associations unhappy about competition from the new legal-services bar. The battle over federal legal services has continued since.

The LSC survives with the backing of elite lawyers, the ABA, and the judiciary, but under many and increasing restrictions on the kinds of clients and cases it can accept. The legal-services offices it funds may not bring class actions, lobby legislators, or represent unions, noncitizens, prisoners, or organizations promoting abortion, school desegregation, or welfare reform. 8 The general aim of conservatives has been to limit LSC-funded lawyers to individual personal aid, and to steer them away from actions with collective consequences like law reform, class actions, impact litigation, or aid to political organizing. 9

In the same political moment as the founding of the Legal Services Program, the Ford Foundation and other grantors supplied funding to create “public interest” law firms that would supply the resources to pursue systemic reform projects affecting the poor. Ford also funded clinical legal education in law schools. The clinics have supplied a significant proportion of liberal-progressive lawyering. These efforts supplemented the longstanding work of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund (LDF) and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), venerable nonprofits funded by subscribers, to seek court decisions favorable to their causes (African American equality for LDF; first, labor organizing and, later, free expression generally and women’s rights for the ACLU).

Institutionalized pro bono lawyering — although still sparse in relation to the perceived need — came out of the same generation as the lawyers who staffed the Legal Services Program. It has persisted and expanded, in part as a means to attract new associates to corporate practice and give them some on-the-job training with real clients. Most pro bono work is performed by lawyers in large firms, who often collaborate effectively with established public interest firms to fund and staff major litigation efforts. Law firm pro bono services now exceed in value the entire federal legal-services budget. Some firms also fund public interest fellowships, as the global Skadden firm does with the Skadden Fellowships.

Like LSC lawyers, however, though for different reasons, law firm pro bono lawyers are restricted in the types of work they are allowed to take on: they generally have to avoid clients such as environmental or labor interests whose general aims may be adverse to the firm’s paying clients. 10 Many bar associations have flirted with proposals to make some pro bono service mandatory, but have abandoned the idea in the face of member opposition. 11 Some state court judges, however, have strongly supported pro bono work. In 2012, New York State made performance of at least 50 hours of pro bono work by students during law school a condition of their admission to the bar. Yet reliable estimates are that, nationwide, American lawyers, on average, perform about half an hour of pro bono work, broadly defined, per year. They make only derisory financial contributions to legal-aid and public interest organizations. 12

At the same time that bar associations — formed and dominated for the early part of the 20th century by elite lawyers — were mostly ignoring calls for civil justice for the poor and middle-class, they were actively campaigning against lawyers for a particular kind of client: plaintiffs’ personal-injury lawyers. Personal-injury lawsuits proliferated in the late nineteenth century as a response to the large-scale carnage of the industrial age: injuries and deaths from mining operations, railroads, street railways, and, eventually, automobiles. A specialized bar, mostly Jewish and night-school trained, developed to serve the injured and their families. They took a contingent fee: 30 to 40 percent of any damages recovered, nothing if they lost. The elite lawyers who represented businesses like railroads and streetcar companies tried to close down the night schools. They used the new bar associations to restrict entry to practice, to draw up ethical codes targeting personal-injury lawyers with prohibitions on advertising and soliciting clients, and to discipline the lawyers for violating the codes. 13 (The Supreme Court struck down the prohibitions on advertising in 1977, though the Court has upheld most restrictions on soliciting paying clients. 14 )

After World War II, the personal-injury lawyers seemed to have prevailed in that battle. They formed a powerful trade association, the American Trial Lawyers Association (ATLA; since renamed the American Association for Justice), that lobbied legislatures and argued in courts for broader theories of liability and damage awards. The ATLA portrayed the plaintiffs’ lawyers as populist champions, representing the little guy against wealthy and well-lawyered corporations. 15 Their cause was aided by the expansions of liability to include strict liability for defective products (such as pharmaceuticals) and changes in the civil procedure rules to favor class actions and multiparty litigation; and by the Supreme Court decision invalidating the bar’s prohibition on advertising.

The defense bar struck back during the general business revolt against regulation beginning in the 1970s and 1980s. Corporate and insurance practitioners warned of a “litigation explosion” of worthless claims that would make American businesses uncompetitive. The trial lawyers were portrayed as greedy exploiters of naive or opportunistic plaintiffs, looking to score settlements out of nuisance suits supported by “junk science.” 16 Some of the critiques were valid, such as that plaintiff and defendant class action lawyers sometimes colluded against the interests of the injured to settle cases early and cheaply, assisted by trial judges trying to clear their dockets. 17 The “litigation explosion” claims have proved mostly mythic, and “junk science” was surely as widely used by defendants (think tobacco) as plaintiffs. But the propaganda of the “tort reform” movement was a huge public relations and political success. 18 Federal and state legislation and court decisions have put limits on both punitive and ordinary damage claims, sometimes imposing strict caps on liability that have the effect of removing lawyers’ incentives to take complex cases. 19 Congress has allowed class action defendants to remove cases to federal courts that are expected to treat plaintiffs less generously. 20

Most observers have concluded that the chief defect of the personal-injury contingent-fee system for handling tort claims is not that it encourages frivolous claims, but that it filters out too many meritorious claims because they do not promise to yield an adequate recovery. 21 Its other main defect is its inefficiency: about 50 percent of recoveries are eaten up by administrative costs, including lawyers’ fees. 22 Some reforms have been proposed, such as enabling outside investors to fund litigation for the big, mass tort claims, which would require loosening ethical prohibitions on fee-sharing with nonlawyers. 23

In the American legal system, in which courts have ample authority to make law through precedent and constitutional rulings, it is not surprising that interest groups should use lawsuits as vehicles of policy-making. In the heyday of what is now called classical legalism (1870–1932), many such suits were brought by corporations to invalidate Progressive Era legislation adverse to their interests. But social movements for subordinated groups have used the same vehicles. In the 19th century, antislavery lawyers brought freedom suits for their slave clients and sought to invalidate the fugitive slave laws and prevent the extension of slavery into new territories.

The most famous and effective uses of lawsuits to create new rights were, of course, those of civil rights and civil liberties organizations like the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, the National Lawyers’ Guild, and the ACLU, among others, on behalf of African Americans, women, political and religious dissenters, labor, the disabled, and gays and lesbians. This was lawyering for a cause, but also lawyering for clients who could not find other lawyers. The NAACP and other movement lawyers represented black criminal defendants whom no Southern lawyer, black or white, could act for without risking loss of all his other clients, as well as movement activists and demonstrators served with injunctions or thrown into jail. Guild lawyers acted for accused communists shunned by the respectable bar. The ACLU was founded to represent pariahs like labor organizers and anti-World War I protestors. 24 These movements were largely staffed by lawyers marginal to the higher reaches of their profession: racial minorities, Jews, women, and a few maverick patricians.

As with federal legal services, the successes of these legal strategies on behalf of social movements inspired attempts to cripple the lawyers and legal organizations that staffed them. In the civil rights era after Brown v. Board of Education , the cream of the establishment bar in the South worked with officials to hobble the public interest lawyers who brought claims to challenge racial segregation and defend protestors from arrest and prosecution. The states demanded lists of NAACP members, accused lawyers in group practices of ethical violations like soliciting clients, and brought suits for stirring up litigation. 25 Most of these efforts were ultimately rebuffed by the Supreme Court, which carved out an exception to the antisolicitation rules for nonprofit public interest lawyers. 26 In the civil rights era, liberal Congresses and judges also created new avenues for private plaintiffs to enforce antidiscrimination statutes, often through the incentive that, if successful, their lawyers could recover attorney fees from the losing side.

“Equal justice under law” sounds like an uncontroversial slogan. But claims to equal rights are also claims to redistribution of resources, status, and authority: when groups shut out of the justice system get lawyers to make those claims effective, the result can be to sharply challenge existing hierarchies of wealth, power, and status. The rights revolution provoked a severe backlash.

Conservative Supreme Courts since the 1980s have cut back the doctrines and remedies favored by liberal courts in the 1960s and 1970s. Conservative judges are generally reluctant to find that Congress has authorized private rights of action unless it has said so explicitly. 27 They are more likely to insist on proof of discriminatory intent, as well as disparate impact, in hiring practices; and to disfavor comprehensive remedies such as structural orders to desegregate school systems or to institute compensatory affirmative action hiring plans.

The Court has also made plaintiffs’ cases more difficult to prove and finance. It has tightened pleading rules to impose more procedural roadblocks to get to discovery; heightened plaintiffs’ burdens of proof while enlarging defenses; severely cut back on punitive damages awards; and made it much harder for public interest plaintiffs to recover attorney’s fees by denying fee awards if defendants agree to settle. 28 In an important string of recent decisions, the Court has approved the now widespread practices of mandatory arbitration clauses in employment and consumer contracts, by which employers require their employees, and consumer products and financial services sellers require their customers, to submit all of their disputes to arbitration and to forgo class actions. The Court has held that federal law preempts and invalidates many state laws that attempt to regulate such practices. 29 By denying plaintiffs the ability to aggregate claims, the Court effectively precludes them from addressing and trying to deter and remedy widespread small violations (such as imposing hidden fees). In some contexts — such as nursing homes that mistreat or neglect their vulnerable patients — that removes any incentive for lawyers to accept cases even to avert horrendous harms.

Criminal prosecution is the sharp end of the state, its most coercive process short of war. Lawyers have long been aware that having a good lawyer who can afford to challenge the state’s evidence and sway a jury confers significant advantages on a criminal defendant. So important was the right to counsel considered that it was enshrined in the early constitutions. Yet the great majority of defendants are indigent. They cannot buy an adequate defense on the market. Nineteenth-century courts gave some recognition to the problem by appointing counsel in serious felony cases, especially capital cases. Some of the law reform-minded bar groups formed in the Progressive Era (not the ABA) began to recognize the problem. There followed a long history of reports and initiatives to try to solve it.

A new urgency to fund criminal defense came from Supreme Court decisions requiring states to provide for indigent defense of federal felony defendants (1938), state felony defendants (1963), and, finally, all accused facing loss of liberty (1972). States responded variously: Some expanded existing public defender offices, others (like most states of the Old Confederacy) assigned counsel — often the dregs of the bar — to represent accused persons, but paid so little (like $500 for a capital case) that all any counsel could hope to get for her client was a hastily negotiated guilty plea. Meanwhile, the wars on crime and on drugs, following a spike in violent crime peaking around 1990, effectively transferred charging and sentencing discretion from judges to prosecutors, reducing even further defense counsel’s only leverage — the credible threat to take a case to trial — in plea negotiations. Now, 55 years after Gideon v. Wainwright , criminal defense remains in a state of crisis. 30 Despite many publicized exonerations of defendants in capital cases wrongly convicted by the state’s misconduct or mistakes, funding for criminal defense has little popular support — in part because most defendants are black or brown — and almost no effective political lobby, though by now the organized bar has taken up its cause.

Contrast England and Wales. After World War II, under pressure to reduce enormous class disparities among a people who had shared equally in wartime sacrifice, the government resolved to try to make the common-law courts, which had been priced far out of the range of most citizens, more accessible. (The prewar and wartime governments tried to compensate by funding Citizens Advice Bureaus that dispensed informal advice to people with legal, or potentially legal, problems. These still exist: there is no law in England giving the profession the monopoly over advice-giving.) The route chosen was a form of judicare: Parliament provided a generous system of state support for solicitors and barristers to represent the indigent. By the 1960s, barristers were receiving over half their collective income from legal-aid cases.

A series of governments, beginning with Margaret Thatcher’s conservative one and followed by conservative and neoliberal ones, decided this scheme was too costly and wasteful, and have gradually dismantled it in favor of central state control over lawyers’ costs and outsourcing to nonprofit providers of more “holistic” services that favor mediation and conciliation over adversarialism in family cases. Personal-injury cases are now, as in the United States, financed by contingent fees. Since 2000, control over providers has been tightened further, subordinating clients’ welfare and rights entirely to budgetary concerns, abandoning audits of quality, and leaving to providers how to deal with exploding caseloads. 31 The legal profession’s responses to these changes have been mixed. Initially, they were outraged by some of the reforms targeting their traditional privileges, like barristers’ monopoly of rights of audience in courts, and solicitors’ monopoly of conveyancing practices. 32 More recently, however, lawyers and judges have rallied to protest cuts in legal services budgets and to try to protect rule-of-law values in a system of administrative controls.

The highest barriers to access to the legal system are its complexity and costs. 33 Complexity calls for personnel with the training to deal with it, and their time and that of the other experts who support their work — forensic accountants, scientific and medical experts, and the like — is expensive. Some blame the complexity of law on lawyers themselves, and there is probably some truth to that charge. But the most likely cause is that a pluralist, fragmented political system like the United States’ proliferates multiple and conflicting laws, and interpretations of those laws, to satisfy the demands of interest groups. Legal procedures are distended to meet the capacities and budgets of their highest-end users: business corporations. 34 The adversary system adds extra expense because investigating facts is left to the parties, their lawyers, and their hired experts rather than to a neutral magistrate as in Europe. Litigation seems not to have been expensive in the 19th century, but became much more so in the 20th, even though actual trials have almost vanished in civil and criminal cases.

Cost and complexity naturally give rise to counterpressures to reduce both. Some well-known studies of litigation rates over time show that with industrialization, they rise sharply, but then start to decline. The reason suggested is that many areas traditionally handled in courts become routinized in administrative procedures, or shunted off to more informal dispute-settlement. 35

There are several examples within the American judicial system:

Compensation for employee injuries beginning around 1910 were shifted out of the tort system into administrative workers’ compensation systems. (Lawyers were at first excluded from the claims system, but forced themselves, and then were allowed, back in.)

Claims for auto accident compensation were, early in the 20th century, largely relegated to insurance agency adjusters, who determined the merit and value of claims, with the courts as a backstop for unsettled cases. 36 Minor “soft-tissue” injuries from accidents are increasingly the province of settlement mills, which send demands for compensation to insurance companies, take a cut of the proceeds, and never try cases. 37

The veterans benefits claim system from the Civil War to 1988 excluded lawyers by providing they could be paid no more than $10 per case. 38

Divorce has been mostly delegalized, taken out of the court system by no-fault divorce, and self-help form-filling in uncontested cases. Many divorce lawyers’ offices now offer mediation services to clients. 39

More ominously, as mentioned above, many tort and contract claims that might otherwise be heard in courts have been relegated to arbitration by mandatory arbitration clauses in most consumer and employee contracts.

Federal immigration rules permit certain kinds of nonlawyer advisors to act for immigrants. 40

Another project of the organized bar that has obstructed access to justice, broadly conceived, has been its sustained efforts to maintain its monopoly over advice-giving that has any legal component. Throughout the 20th century, using statutes prohibiting the “unauthorized practice of law,” the bar has fought turf wars with many competitors, some won and some lost. 41 The bar ceded most tax preparation work to accountants, and real-estate closings in many states to title companies and realtors. It is currently challenging firms like LegalZoom and RocketLawyer, which supply mostly standardized legal services for relatively routine transactions.

Many current proposals are in the air to relax unauthorized practice rules to allow paraprofessionals who have gone through a short training and certification program to help clients navigate disputes and adverse government actions. Segments of the organized bar, although still mounting phalanxes of resistance, have begun to perceive the inutility and bad public relations of resisting nonlawyer involvement in markets its monopoly does not serve. There are many areas of practice in which specialized paraprofessional providers could give better service than barely competent generalist graduates of law schools (immigration law is a prime example).

An ABA Commission on Nonlawyer Practice recommended in 1995 that unauthorized-practice rules be relaxed to permit the licensing of paraprofessionals. 42 The ABA ignored the report. In 2012, the Supreme Court of Washington State agreed to license paralegals, but, as of 2018, they were limited to 28 paralegals in family practice, regulated by the state bar, and not allowed to appear in court; and they face hostility from family lawyers. 43 In general, it is unrealistic to expect bar associations, representing a profession facing high levels of unemployment among recent law graduates, to go very far to welcome competing providers.

In the profession’s long history, leading lawyers and judges have recognized and sporadically acted on the profession’s public obligations to open paths to legal services for relatively poor people. They have frequently acknowledged that the ideal of the rule of law requires universal access to justice. The profession’s ideals have inspired some of its exceptional members to devote their careers to serving and promoting service to poor or unpopular clienteles. Those ideals and their heroic exemplars still lead students to apply to law schools and, once in practice, to seek out occasions for pro bono work or charitable or government service.

But most lawyers, most of the time, are concerned with making a profitable living, and not much interested in supplying or financing legal services for others: They put their own interests first, then their clients’, and only as an afterthought, the public’s and nonpaying clienteles’. More disturbing, lawyers for powerful clients facing opposition from weaker adversaries have proved all too willing to subvert the ideals of equal access to law, under the pretext of economic efficiency, by denying a level playing field to lawyers for the other side. Remember, for example, the campaigns against the tort plaintiff’s bar and for mandatory arbitration clauses in employment and consumer contracts, and the attacks on law reform efforts of legal services and on fee awards supporting the public interest and civil rights bars. 44

Professional organizations such as bar associations have always had a dual character: They are official spokesmen for the public aspirations of the profession to serve the ideals of the rule of law and universal justice, and often sponsors of programs to make the ideals effective; but they are primarily guilds whose aim is to protect and expand monopoly domains for their members’ work, demand for their services, and their fees and profits. When those public aims and the guild’s interests conflict, the leaders and the rank-and-file of the bar tend, not surprisingly, to favor the guild’s. Initiatives to make justice more accessible have been more likely, when they come, to originate with those marginal to or outside of the profession.

European societies have long accepted the responsibilities of providing legal services, just as they provide health care, to people who cannot afford them as basic responsibilities of the state. 45 In the United States, the government underwrites over half of the cost of health care (through Medicare, Medicaid, and programs of the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs). But for legal services, we are still depending on direct client funding plus a stingy and hobbled federal program and a mishmash of volunteer and philanthropic efforts. That is no way to run a system that aspires to equal justice.

• If empirical support is needed for so obvious a proposition, see the classic study of the Chicago Bar: John P. Heinz, Robert L. Nelson, Rebecca L. Sandefur, and Edward O. Laumann, Urban Lawyers: The New Social Structure of the Bar (2005).
• James A. Brundage, Legal Aid for the Poor and the Professionalization of Law in the Middle Ages , 9 Am. J. Legal Hist. 171, 174 (1988).
• David J. Seipp, Legal Services for the Poor in the Early Common Law , in Law and Society in Later Medieval England and Ireland: Essays in Honour of Paul Brand (2018), discussing An Act to Admit Such Persons as Are Poor to Sue in Forma Pauperis, Statute 11 Hen. 7, chap. 12, reprinted in 2 Statutes of the Realm, 578 (1495).
• See Christopher W. Brooks, Litigation and Society in England , 1200–1996, in Lawyers, Litigation and English Society Since 1450 63, 94–95 (1998).
• For the pioneering role of the women’s societies, see Felice Batlan, Women and Justice for the Poor: A History of Legal Aid, 1863–1945 (2015).
• Reginald Heber Smith, Justice and the Poor: A Study of the Present Denial of Justice to the Poor and of the Agencies Making More Equal Their Position Before the Law with Particular Reference to Legal Aid Work in the United States(1919).
• See Earl Johnson Jr., To Establish Justice for All: The Past and Future of Civil Legal Aid in the United States, Vol. 1 3–43 (2014).
• The restrictions on LSC-funded lawyers are summarized at Legal Services Corporation, About Statutory Restrictions on LSC-Funded Programs , https://www.lsc.gov/about-statutory-restrictions-LSC-funded-programs . For more information on their effects, see Brennan Ctr. for Justice, Restricting Legal Services: How Congress Left the Poor with Only Half a Lawyer (2000).
• The definitive history of OEO-LSP and LSC is by one of the program’s early directors, Earl Johnson Jr., in his book To Establish Justice for All .
• See Scott Cummings, The Politics of Pro Bono , 52 UCLA L. Rev. 116–23 (2004).
• Deborah L. Rhode, Access to Justice 148–51 (2004).
• Id. at 154–55.
• Jerald Auerbach, Unequal Justice: Lawyers and Social Change in Modern America(1976).
• Bates v. State Bar of Arizona , 433 U.S. 350 (1977); and Ohralik v. Ohio State Bar , 446 U.S. 447 (1978).
• John Fabian Witt, Patriots and Cosmopolitans: Hidden Histories of American Law (2009) (chapter 4).
• See, e.g. , Walter K. Olson, The Litigation Explosion: What Happened When America Unleashed the Lawsuit(1991); Walter K. Olson, The Rule of Lawyers: How the New Litigation Elite Threatens America’s Rule of Law (2003); Philip K. Howard, The Death of Common Sense: How Law is Suffocating America(1994).
• See, e.g. , John C. Coffee Jr., Class Wars: The Dilemma of the Mass Tort Class Action , 95 Colum. L. Rev. 1343 (1995).
• See, e.g. , Marc Galanter, Reading the Landscape of Disputes: What We Know and Don’t Know (and Think We Know) about our Allegedly Contentious and Litigious Society , 31 UCLA L. Rev. 4 (1983).
• See Stephen Daniels and Joanne Martin, Evidence on the Link Between Damage Caps and Access to the Civil Justice System , 55 Depaul L. Rev. 635 (2006).
• Class Action Fairness Act of 2005 (CAFA), 28 U.S.C § 1332(d).
• Richard L. Abel, The Real Tort Crisis — Too Few Claims , 48 Ohio St. L.J. 443 (1987).
• See Deborah R. Hensler, Mary E. Vaiana, James S. Kakalik, and Mark A. Peterson, Trends in Tort Litigation: The Story Behind the Statistics 29 (1987) (Table 4.1).
• Model Rules of Prof’l Conduct§ 5.4.
• See Mark Tushnet, The Rights Revolution in the Twentieth Century , in The Cambridge History of Law in America, Vol. 3, 377–402 (2008).
• See, for example, the Virginia antisolicitation statute invalidated in NAACP v. Button , 371 U.S. 415 (1963).
• In Re Primus , 436 U.S. 412 (1978).
• Pamela S. Karlan, Disarming the Private Attorney General , 2003 U. Ill. L. Rev. 183.
• See Stephen B. Burbank and Sean Farhang, Retrenching Civil Rights Litigation: Why the Court Succeeded Where Congress Failed , in The Rights Revolution Revisited: Institutional Perspectives on the Private Enforcement of Civil Rights in the U.S. 197—223 (Lynda G. Dodd ed., 2018).
• AT&T Mobility LLC v. Concepcion , 131 S. Ct. 1740 (2011); American Express Co. v. Italian Colors Restaurant , 133 S. Ct. 2304 (2013); and Epic Systems Corp. v. Lewis , 138 S. Ct. 1612 (2018)
• Stephen B. Bright and Sia M. Sanneh, Fifty Years of Defiance and Resistance after Gideon v. Wainwright, 122 Yale L.J. 2150 (2013).
• See Hilary Sommerlad, Some Reflections on the Relationship between Citizenship, Access to Justice, and the Reform of Legal Aid , 31 J. Law & Society 345 (2004).
• Richard L. Abel, English Lawyers between Market and State: The Politics of Professionalism (2004).
• The most comprehensive analysis of legal complexity and costs and their causes is Gillian K. Hadfield, Rules for a Flat World: Why Humans Invented Law and How to Reinvent It for a Complex Global Economy (2016) (chapter 7).
• See Robert A. Kagan, Do Lawyers Cause Adversarial Legalism? A Preliminary Inquiry , 19 Law & Social Inquiry 1 (1994).
• See Lawrence M. Friedman, Access to Justice: Social and Historical Context , in Access to Justice: Promising Institutions, Vol. 2 (Mauro Cappelletti and John Weisner eds., 1978).
• H. Laurence Ross, Settled Out of Court: The Social Process of Insurance Claims Adjustment(1970).
• Nora Freeman Engstrom, Sunlight and Settlement Mills , 86 NYU L. Rev. 805 (2011).
• Codified as 38 U.S.C § 3404(c)(2).
• Rhode, supra note 11, at 81–82.
• U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, Representation before USCIS , in Adjudicator’s Field Manual (2012), available at https://www.uscis.gov/sites/default/files/document/policy-manual-afm/afm12-external.pdf (revised Apr. 23, 2012).
• Deborah L. Rhode, Policing the Professional Monopoly: A Constitutional and Empirical Analysis of Unauthorized Practice Prohibitions , 14 Stan. L. Rev. 1 (1981); and Richard L. Abel, American Lawyers112–126 (1989).
• ABA Commission on Nonlawyer Practice, Nonlawyer Activity in Law-Related Situations (1995), https://www.paralegals.org/files/ABA_Commission_on_Non-Lawyer_Practice.pdf.
• Washington State Bar Association, Limited License Legal Technicians , available at https://www.wsba.org/for-legal-professionals/join-the-legal-profession-in-wa/limited-license-legal-technicians ; and Nicole Shilling, Loosening a Legal Monopoly: Perspectives from Paraprofessional Pioneers (unpublished interview study of Washington LLLTs).
• For a catalog of several such efforts, see David Luban, Taking Out the Adversary: The Assault on Progressive Public-Interest Lawyers , 91 Cal. L. Rev. 209 (2003).
• See Richard L. Abel, Law without Politics: Legal Aid Under Advanced Capitalism , 32 UCLA L. Rev. 474, 492–94 (1985).

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• Boxed In: Does the Prospect of Re-Selection Influence Judicial Decision Making?
• She Lifted Her Voice: Constance Baker Motley (1921–2005) U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York
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• Stevens, J., Dissenting: The Legacy of Heller
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About Robert W. Gordon

Robert W. Gordon is a professor of law at Stanford Law School and the Chancellor Kent Professor Emeritus of Law and Legal History at Yale Law School. He is the author of Taming the Past: Essays on Law in History and History in Law (2017) and editor of Law, Society, and History: Themes in the Legal Sociology and Legal History of Lawrence M. Friedman (with Morton J. Horowitz, 2011) and The Legacy of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. (1992).

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Why do you want to be a lawyer? Best sample answers

Studying law is no walk in a park . You’ll have to sacrifice a lot , and you will typically pay a lot for your degree–for a mere chance of obtaining it. What’s more, the demand for the places in the study program is incredibly high at any decent university offering law degrees . You will compete with many other people in the admission interviews, and unless you convince the committee of your motivation, they will choose someone else, and you will have to try your luck elsewhere, or wait one more year. So, why law ? Why did you choose law as a career?

Let’s have a look at 7 sample answers to the question. I tried to include in my selection a variety of answers, referring to different reasons, including some unconventional answers . Read them slowly, one after one, and consider whether any of them conveys the message you want to convey in your interviews, while trying to impress the admission committee members. Once done, do not forget to check also my notes below the answers, for additional hints on how to stand out and make sure they will remember you once the interviews end, and they decide about the successful applicants.

7 sample answers to “Why are you interested in studying law?” interview question

• I see a lot of injustice in the world . And now I do not talk only about poor countries and inequality we can observe over there. When you have your eyes open, you will see things aren’t much better in the US . Especially in the corporate world, but also in the families. And I’d like to play my part in making things better . I consider specializing either in family law or environmental law , because these two fields are really close to my heart and I consider them incredibly important at the moment , and I also believe there is a lot of room for new quality lawyers, people who can make some difference . I find it fascinating to imagine that I represent interests of people in front of a court one day. And though the road ahead is long, I am motivated and ready to try my best.
• I want to be completely honest with you: money is my main driving force. Let’s look at things as they are. I am lucky enough to belong to the brightest students in my city, and I also enjoy studying and working hard on my skills. With my grades and resume, I could get to almost any college , and study any subject. Because I know I would manage it, and I know they would accept me. So why not to try going for the pinnacle? Lawyers and other legal professionals earn excellent salaries and enjoy a lot of respect in their circles. And I would love to find myself in the same position one day, because I do not dream of earning an average wage. I want to make it big in my career, and provide for my family.
• I find law and excellent match for my personality and strengths . To start with, I have a great memory , excellent communication and argumentation skills. I am also extremely ambitious, but have strong moral codex  at the same time, which I believe is a good combination for any lawyer. And I enjoy talking to people, especially from the business world. That’s why I’d love to specialize in corporate law, and perhaps one day have my own legal office . This is why I want to be a lawyer, and not a doctor for example.
• I see law as a degree which offers one almost unlimited options on the employment market. Sure, the competition is huge. But nowadays, each organization, public or private, need someone with legal knowledge , someone who makes sure they adhere to the laws and regulations and avoid fines, someone who represents them in confrontations with various regulatory bodies. I believe that once I have a degree from your university, I will have many doors open. To sum it up, I see this degree as the best possible start to my professional career .
• Three reasons. First one, love for the field . It fascinates me how a skilled lawyer can save a business millions of dollars, or save an individual from years in prison. Second reason is financial stability . Lawyers do not struggle with monthly bills. And the third, equally important reason, is job security . People and companies will always go to court, needing assistance of legal professionals. Once you establish yourself on the market and get some clientele, you do not have to worry about having little work , or about losing your job…
• I honestly believe that law is such an important part of our life , and basically omnipresent, that each lawyer can make a positive difference in the individual lives of people they work with, and represent in front of the court of justice. The idea of helping people, and at the same time getting excellent compensation for my work , truly fascinates me. I believe you cannot find any other job field with similar characteristics. On the top of that, I am a great student, and have no doubts that I will manage to pass the exams and eventually get my degree. Law is a hard field, but I feel ready to make a great career in the field.
• I’ve always felt this need to help underprivileged people protect their rights. Maybe the main reason is that I also come from an underprivileged family , and I know how hard it was to get some justice, when we needed it the most. What’s more, I just love thinking out of the box , putting things together , and I have great attention to detail. I believe that job of attorney is a perfect choice from someone like me, considering my strengths, career goals, and everything else. And I cannot wait to start.

Special Tip : What if I told you that you can practice your answers to all tricky law school interview questions, getting an immediate feedback from a life-like AI interview coach ? And that you can start doing it for free , and it is a lot of fun too? 🙂 Check out this page on our partner website , Real Mock Interviews, pick a question, enter your email, and start practicing for free , either on your mobile phone or on your computer. Check it out now and see for yourself!

Try to be specific in your answer

I know it is hard to think about your future once you are in your early twenties. You have your entire life in front of you. So many options, but also many challenges this generation faces. Anyway, try to think about your future for a few minutes before going to your law school interview.

What field of law would you prefer to specialize in later on? Criminal, civil rights, family, immigration, or even international law? Once you choose the field, think about the position you’d like to have in it, in ten years from now . Maybe you want to work for a particular company, or on a particular case.

Perhaps you want to represent a particular group of people , or help members of a specific community. And maybe you’d like to start your own legal practice eventually, working for yourself, instead of for someone else. And while your goals may change several times until you earn your degree (if you manage to earn it at all, the average dropout rate at law school is over 20% ), it is still good to have a specific vision for your future , a vision which motivates you, and will help you to handle the heavy workload at school, as well as other challenges. The more specific you are in your answer, the better your chances to succeed. I wish you good luck!

Ready to answer this question? Great! But do not forget to check also other tricky questions you may face in your school admission interview:

• Does your academic record accurately reflect your capabilities?
• Where do you see yourself in five years from now?
• How do you handle success?
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How to Write a First-Class Law Essay

Studying law at university entails lots of essay writing. This article takes you through the key steps to writing a top law essay.

Writing a law essay can be a challenging task. As a law student, you’ll be expected to analyse complex legal issues and apply legal principles to real-world scenarios. At the same time, you’ll need to be able to communicate your ideas clearly and persuasively. In this article, we’ll cover some top tips to guide you through the process of planning, researching, structuring and writing a first-class law essay with confidence. 

1. Start In Advance

Give yourself plenty of time to plan, research and write your law essay. Always aim to start your law essay as soon as you have the question. Leaving it until the last minute does not only create unnecessary stress, but it also leaves you insufficient time to write, reference and perfect your work.

2. Understand The Question

Do not begin until you fully comprehend the question. Take the time to read the question carefully and make sure that you understand what it’s asking you to do. Highlight key terms and annotate the question with definitions of key concepts and any questions that you have have. Think about how the question links back to what you’ve learned during your lectures or through your readings.

3. Conduct Thorough Research

Conducting thorough research around your topic is one of the most fundamental parts of the essay writing process. You should aim to use a range of relevant sources, such as cases, academic articles, books and any other legal materials. Ensure that the information you collect is taken from relevant, reliable and up to date sources. Use primary over secondary material as much as possible.

Avoid using outdated laws and obscure blog posts as sources of information. Always aim to choose authoritative sources from experts within the field, such as academics, politicians, lawyers and judges. Using high-quality and authoritative sources and demonstrating profound and critical insight into your topic are what will earn you top marks.

4. Write A Detailed Plan

Once you’ve done your research, it’s time to plan your essay. When writing your plan, you’ll need to create an outline that clearly identifies the main points that you wish to make throughout your article. Try to write down what you wish to achieve in each paragraph, what concepts you want to discuss and arguments you want to make.

Your outline should be organised in a clear, coherent and logical manner to ensure that the person grading your essay can follow your line of thought and arguments easily.  You may also wish to include headings and subheadings to structure your essay effectively This makes it easier when it comes to writing the essay as starting without a plan can get messy. The essay must answer the question and nothing but the question so ensure all of your points relate to it.

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5. Write A Compelling Introduction

A great introduction should, firstly, outline the research topic.  The introduction is one of the most crucial parts of the law essay as it sets the tone for the rest of the paper. It should capture the readers attention and provide the background context on the topic. Most importantly, it should state the thesis of your essay.

When writing your introduction, avoid simply repeating the given question. Secondly, create a road map for the reader, letting them know how the essay will approach the question. Your introduction must be concise. The main body of the essay is where you will go into detail.

6. Include A Strong Thesis Statement

Your thesis should clearly set out the argument you are going to be making throughout your essay and should normally go in the introduction. Your thesis should adopt a clear stance rather than being overly general or wishy-washy. To obtain the best grades, you’ll need to show a unique perspective based upon a critical analysis of the topic rather than adopting the most obvious point of view.

Once you’ve conducted your research and had a chance to reflect on your topic, ask yourself whether you can prove your argument within the given word count or whether you would need to adopt a more modest position for your paper. Always have a clear idea of what your thesis statement is before you begin writing the content of your essay. 

7. Present the Counter-argument

To demonstrate your deeper understanding of the topic, it’s important to show your ability to consider the counter-arguments and address them in a careful and reasoned manner. When presenting your counterarguments, aim to depict them in the best possible light, aiming to be fair and reasonable before moving on to your rebuttal. To ensure that your essay is convincing, you will need to have a strong rebuttal that explains why your argument is stronger and more persuasive. This will demonstrate your capacity for critical analysis, showing the reader that you have carefully considered differing perspectives before coming to a well-supported conclusion.

8. End With A Strong Conclusion

Your conclusion is your opportunity to summarise the key points made throughout your essay and to restate the thesis statement in a clear and concise manner.  Avoid simply repeating what has already been mentioned in the body of the essay. For top grades, you should use the conclusion as an opportunity to provide critical reflection and analysis on the topic. You may also wish to share any further insights or recommendations into alternative avenues to consider or implications for further research that could add value to the topic. 

9. Review The Content Of Your Essay

Make sure you factor in time to edit the content of your essay.  Once you’ve finished your first draft, come back to it the next day. Re-read your essay with a critical perspective. Do your arguments make sense? Do your paragraphs flow in a logical manner? You may also consider asking someone to read your paper and give you critical feedback. They may be able to add another perspective you haven’t considered or suggest another research paper that could add value to your essay. 

10. Proofread For Grammatical Mistakes

Once you’re happy with the content of your essay, the last step is to thoroughly proofread your essay for any grammatical errors. Ensure that you take time to ensure that there are no grammar, spelling or punctuation errors as these can be one of the easiest ways to lose marks. You can ask anyone to proofread your paper, as they would not necessarily need to have a legal background – just strong grammar and spelling skills! 

11. Check Submission Guidelines

Before submitting, ensure that your paper conforms with the style, referencing and presentation guidelines set out by your university. This includes the correct font, font size and line spacing as well as elements such as page numbers, table of content etc. Referencing is also incredibly important as you’ll need to make sure that you are following the correct referencing system chosen by your university. Check your university’s guidelines about what the word count is and whether you need to include your student identification number in your essay as well. Be thorough and don’t lose marks for minor reasons!

12. Use Legal Terms Accurately

Always make sure that you are using legal terms accurately throughout your essay. Check an authoritative resource if you are unsure of any definitions. While being sophisticated is great, legal jargon if not used correctly or appropriately can weaken your essay. Aim to be concise and to stick to the point. Don’t use ten words when only two will do.

12. Create a Vocabulary Bank

One recurring piece of advice from seasoned law students is to take note of phrases from books and articles, key definitions or concepts and even quotes from your professors. When it comes to writing your law essay, you will have a whole range of ideas and vocabulary that will help you to develop your understanding and thoughts on a given topic. This will make writing your law essay even easier!

13. Finally, Take Care of Yourself

Last but certainly not least, looking after your health can improve your attitude towards writing your law essay your coursework in general. Sleep, eat, drink and exercise appropriately. Take regular breaks and try not to stress. Do not forget to enjoy writing the essay!

Words by Karen Fulton

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Lawyers as Professionals and Citizens: Key Roles and Responsibilities in the 21st Century

Ben W. Heineman, Jr. is a former GE senior vice president for law and public affairs and a senior fellow at Harvard University’s schools of law and government. This post is based on an essay by Mr. Heineman, William F. Lee , and David B. Wilkins ; the complete publication is available here .

We have written a detailed essay presenting practical vision of the responsibilities of lawyers as both professionals and as citizens at the beginning of the 21 st century. Specifically, we seek to define and give content to four ethical responsibilities that we believe are of signal importance to lawyers in their fundamental roles as expert technicians, wise counselors, and effective leaders: responsibilities to their clients and stakeholders; responsibilities to the legal system; responsibilities to their institutions; and responsibilities to society at large. Our fundamental point is that the ethical dimensions of lawyering for this era must be given equal attention to—and must be highlighted and integrated with—the significant economic, political, and cultural changes affecting major legal institutions and the people and institutions lawyers serve.

We have chosen to write this essay as a joint statement from a former general counsel of a global corporation, a former managing partner of an international law firm, and a professor of the legal profession at a major law school. We therefore focus our discussion on the four ethical duties in the institutions we know best—corporate legal departments, large law firms, and leading law schools—and on the important connections among them. But we also hope that both the ethical framework we propose and our commitment to a shared responsibility for giving it practical effect will have resonance in the many other important settings in which lawyers work. The four duties are, we believe, central to what it means to be a lawyer, even as the practical expression of these responsibilities will undoubtedly vary by context and will require new and greater collaboration that reaches across many of the profession’s traditional divides.

In presenting our views, we are mindful of the dramatic changes in both the legal profession and in society that make the realization of our—or any other—ethical vision of lawyering especially difficult today. There is widespread agreement that the legal profession is in a period of stress and transition; its economic models are under duress; the concepts of its professional uniqueness are narrow and outdated; and, as a result, its ethical imperatives are weakened and their sources ill-defined. We are also mindful that some will resist the invitation to review and address the broad array of ethical issues we raise in a time in which so many of the profession’s traditional economic assumptions are in question. Nevertheless, we reject the idea that there is an inherent and irresolvable conflict between “business” and “service.” To the contrary, we believe that, while tradeoffs about resource allocation will certainly be required, the proper recognition of each of the four ethical duties we explore is ultimately essential to the sustainability of “business”—whether that is the “business” of companies, law firms, or law schools, or more broadly, the health of our economic and political system as a whole. We therefore hope that this essay will stimulate an integrated discussion among the broad range of actors with a stake in the future of the legal profession not just about the pressing economic issues in major legal institutions but also about the equally pressing concerns relating to ethical responsibilities.

The essay has six parts.

We first set out our basic framework. It explicates lawyers’ three fundamental roles as expert technicians, wise counselors, and effective leaders. It describes the sources and broad definitions of lawyers’ four responsibilities: duties to clients and stakeholders; duties to the legal system; duties to one’s own institution; and duties to the broader society. To effectively discharge these responsibilities, it argues that lawyers must not only have “core” legal competencies but also “complementary” competencies involving broad vision, knowledge, and organizational skills that, while not unique to lawyers, are essential to the counseling and leadership roles. This Part thus describes how our framework goes beyond the limits of the bar’s formal ethical rules and challenges lawyers as both professionals and as citizens.

Second, we describe the context for our analysis. While recognizing the profound importance of other entities, we explain that we have chosen leading companies, law firms, and law schools as the focus of our analysis because of their influence in setting norms for lawyers, their role in providing counselors and leaders across society, and their standing in public perception of the law. It outlines our assumptions about the large-scale forces transforming the economics of these institutions. These include accelerating competition, costs, technology development and transparency—and, in the case of companies and firms, undue focus on short-term profit maximization and profits per partner. All these factors gain greater force from globalization. A final contextual dimension is the cost and paradox of regulation of the legal profession: increasing the cost of becoming a lawyer while reducing the competition from other more effective and efficient providers of legal or legally related services. And, while noting that efforts to discharge the four responsibilities will entail allocation of resources and trade-offs, we maintain that forging a new, contemporary partnership between “service” and “business” is essential to the success, sustainability, and durability of these institutions.

Third, we discuss corporate law departments. Due to major trends in recent decades—the General Counsel becoming the senior counselor to boards and CEOs and the shift of power over money and matters from outside law firms to inside law departments—the General Counsel and inside lawyers have a special obligation to give practical meaning to the four responsibilities in leading corporations. The overarching theme of this Part is that the purpose of corporations, especially transnational ones, is the fusion of high performance with high integrity. Integrity is defined as ensuring robust adherence to formal rules, establishing binding ethical standards, advocating balanced public policy and fair political processes, and instilling the values of honesty, candor, fairness, reliability, and trustworthiness in employees. The General Counsel should also have a broad scope beyond law to include ethics, reputation, and geopolitical risk and should function as expert, counselor, and leader to assist the board and the business leaders in establishing an integrity culture in the institution. The General Counsel and all inside lawyers should aspire to be “lawyer-statespersons” who ask first “is it legal” but ask last “is it right,” and who can resolve the central tension of being both a partner to the business leader and the ultimate guardian of the corporation’s integrity. Inside lawyers have a special calling to surface, analyze, and recommend actions relating both to the corporation’s employees and to other stakeholders that go beyond what the formal legal and accounting rules require and that address the many ethical issues facing global business in challenging environments. Finally, inside lawyers must recognize that they have a shared responsibility—and the obligation to share costs—with firms to provide challenging experiences and training for young lawyers. They must also use their influence (through, for example, new supplier guidelines) to encourage law firms to join with companies in addressing vital issues like provision of pro bono services, diversity, and needed reforms in the legal system both at home and abroad by making these issues important considerations in firm retention.

Fourth, we address law firms and the imbalance between “service” and “business” that has resulted from a myopic focus on short-term economics. To be sure, there have been benefits to the profession from increased transparency concerning operation of firms and the resulting increased competition among firms. But the relentless focus on short-term economic success has adversely affected the culture and institutional integrity of firms; the training, mentoring, and development of young lawyers; the ability of firms and their lawyers to service the poor and underprivileged; and the ability of firms and their lawyers to devote time to the profession and the broader needs of society. We urge a rebalancing of the sometimes competing goals of “economic” and “professional” success. This rebalancing will require leadership and vision which will (1) affirm the priority of excellence and quality over mere hours generation; (2) articulate a vision for and create a culture which revives and restores the institutional fabric of firms; (3) affirm the commitment to meaningful mentoring and development of young lawyers; (4) affirm the commitment to the profession, including pro bono services and the “Rule of Law”; and (5) affirm the role of lawyers as the architects of a well-functioning constitutional democracy. This rebalancing will not be easy and will require commitment to long-term goals and values, even at the expense of short-term economics.

Fifth, we turn our attention to the implications of our framework for “leading” law schools. We begin from the premise that law schools play a critical—but not exclusive—role both in teaching students to become expert technicians, wise counselors, and astute leaders, and in generating knowledge about law and legal institutions (including about the legal profession itself), and about the relationship between these institutions and the health and welfare of the broader society. To achieve these twin goals—and to find a proper balance between the two—law schools should reexamine how they are preparing students for the challenges that they will face throughout their increasingly diverse careers, and how faculty members understand their obligations to the legal framework and society, and to the law school as an institution. With respect to educating students, we urge law schools to create courses that focus directly on teaching lawyering roles and responsibilities in specific contexts and that explore key complementary competencies. We also advocate breaking down the artificial barriers that currently exist between “theory” and “practice,” and between “law” and other disciplines, by developing new teaching materials (for example “business school” style case studies), new faculty (for example, Professors of Practice with significant experience outside of the academy, and team teaching with faculty from other disciplines), and a new integration between the placement function and the core educational objectives of the school. To achieve these goals, we put forward a number of specific reforms designed to restructure and refocus the third year of law school, while rejecting calls to eliminate it altogether. Finally, we underscore the critical need for deans and faculty to rededicate themselves to articulating a broad but nevertheless common understanding of the purposes of legal education and legal scholarship that gives appropriate recognition to the role that law schools—and law professors—play as part of the legal profession in addition to their role as an important part of the academy. Faculty and administrators should then use this purpose to guide the difficult tradeoffs around hiring, promotion, curricula, research, funding, and the allocation of other scarce resources that will inevitably be required to begin to achieve these common goals.

Finally, we briefly discuss ways in which leading corporate law departments, law firms, and law schools can collaborate jointly to address the needs of young lawyers, to act on the needs of the legal system and society, to bridge the divide between the profession and the professoriate, and to develop better information on lawyers and the legal profession both here and abroad. It sets out next steps which include seeking short, written comments from leading thinkers which will be published early next year and holding a conference to discuss the issues raised both in this essay and in the comments at Harvard Law School in the first half of 2015.

The complete publication is available here .

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Legal Profession Act amendments to be tabled in October

Tuesday, 20 Aug 2024

Related News

Malaysian Bar's legal challenge against royal pardon invalid due to lack of AGM quorum, says Najib

Kula backs call to have legal profession qualifying board accounts tabled in parliament, ‘very wrong... very shameful’: judge tells man who made daughter, 10, perform indecent act on him.

PUTRAJAYA: The proposed amendments to the Legal Profession Act 1976 (Act 166), if approved by the Cabinet, will be tabled in Parliament this October and are expected to benefit 23,000 legal practitioners in the country.

The Legal Affairs Division of the Prime Minister's Department (BHEUU) in a statement on Tuesday (Aug 20) said that a Cabinet Memorandum for consideration and approval will also be brought later for the proposed amendment to Act 166.

For that purpose, a meeting between the Minister in the Prime Minister's Department (Legal and Institutional Reform) Datuk Seri Azalina Othman Said and the Bar Council was held recently to discuss some necessary improvements to Act 166 and measures to strengthen legal services in meeting future challenges.

"The meeting discussed several matters in Act 166 that require improvements, namely limited liability legal partnerships, legal aid centres, Section 77 regarding Bar Council’s powers with the approval of the Attorney General and Sections 11, 15, and 36 related to pupillage," the statement read.

According to BHEUU, the Bar Council has also proposed the establishment of an Inter Asean Lawyer's Association.

Further discussions were also held regarding the formulation of new legislation related to legal aid that will take into account the public defence aspect of criminal cases, which are currently being handled by the National Legal Aid Foundation (YBGK).

The government is of the view that the Bar Council should be given ample space to determine its own direction in managing the affairs of the legal profession, including administrative matters and the welfare of its members.

The discussion was also attended by the Deputy Minister in the Prime Minister's Department (Law and Institutional Reform) M. Kulasegaran and Bar Council president Mohamad Ezri Abdul Wahab. – Bernama

Tags / Keywords: Legal Profession Act , Act 166 , Amendments , Parliament , BHEUU , Azalina Othman Said , Bar Council , YBGK , Legal Aid , Legal Practitioners

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Guest Essay

Do Politicians Realize How Difficult and Rare Immigrating to the U.S. Legally Actually Is?

By Jorge Loweree

Mr. Loweree is the managing director of programs and strategy at the American Immigration Council.

During the Republican National Convention, speakers repeatedly tried to draw a contrast between asylum seekers who’ve crossed the southern border in recent years and immigrants who’ve entered the country through other channels. As Vivek Ramaswamy put it, legal immigrants like his parents “deserve the opportunity to secure a better life for your children in America.” Others deserve deportation, “because you broke the law.”

Elected leaders like to invoke this narrative that there’s an easy, “right” and a hard, “wrong” way to immigrate to the United States, because it makes the solution for fixing our broken immigration system seem simple. We just need more law-abiding people to get in the right line.

But the reality that is all too clear to immigrants navigating our byzantine system, and the lawyers and advocates who try to help them, is that there is no line to get into for a vast majority of people who wish to come to the United States. If the government is serious about securing the border, we have to make it easier for people to come through legal channels.

The U.S. admits a tiny fraction of people who want to immigrate

Number of people who said they want to immigrate or who legally applied, compared to those granted permanent residence

158 million people would like to immigrate to the U.S.

32 million people actually began the application process in 2021

family members

Only 900,000 people were allowed to enter legally

Sources: Gallup, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services

Note: Data was originally compiled in “ Why Legal Immigration Is Nearly Impossible ” by David Bier for the Cato Institute. The number of people who would like to immigrate is taken from a 2018 Gallup poll.

Our system of legal immigration isn’t set up to reward “good” choices. It is littered with arbitrary caps, bureaucratic delays and redundant processes that wring years of effort and money out of the precious few who qualify.

The current system is largely designed to favor those who have family ties here: namely, spouses, parents and adult children who are U.S. citizens and spouses and children of lawful permanent residents.

For some countries, the wait time to get a family-based visa stretches into centuries

Estimated wait time for family-sponsored visas in capped categories as of 2021

Visa for an unmarried adult child

Philippines

Married adult child

Sibling of adult citizens

YEARS TO PROCESS

All other countries

Sources: U.S. State Department, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services

Note: Data was originally compiled in “ Why Legal Immigration Is Nearly Impossible ” by David Bier for the Cato Institute. “All other countries” represents the average.

The green card approval rate is at a historic low point

Share of legal immigrants that were approved for permanent residency

GREEN CARD APPROVAL RATE

Until the 1920s, almost anyone could arrive in the U.S. and be granted permanent residency.

Rates rose during the 1960s when Congress added new visa categories and exceptions to allow more people to immigrate.

They fell in the 1980s after the creation of the green card lottery, as many more people began applying.

Sources: U.S. Department of State, U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service

Note: Data was originally compiled in “ Why Legal Immigration Is Nearly Impossible ” by David Bier for the Cato Institute.

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