AT THE EDGE OF LAW: EMERGENT AND DIVERGENT MODELS OF LEGAL PROFESSIONALISM by ANDREW FRANCIS
| Published date | 01 September 2012 |
| Date | 01 September 2012 |
| Author | JULIAN WEBB |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-6478.2012.00596.x |
AT THE EDGE OF LAW: EMERGENT AND DIVERGENT MODELS OF
LEGAL PROFESSIONALISM by ANDREW FRANCIS
(Farnham: Ashgate, 2011, ix and 215 pp., £65.00)
The emergence of an increasingly liberalized legal services market in
England and Wales, driven by the regulatory reforms of the Legal Services
Act (LSA) 2007 once again makes the Anglo-Welsh legal profession a fertile
area for research, and one of increasingly global interest. In this context
Andrew Francis's At the Edge of Law constitutes a welcome addition to the
literature on both the legal services market in England and Wales, and on
legal professionalism as a construct.
The book is organized as a set of five relatively discrete case studies,
which reflect much of Francis's own research output since the late 1990s.
These are framed by opening and concluding chapters which seek to locate
the lessons learned from the periphery of legal work within existing theories
of legal professionalism, and also to reflect on ways in which our under-
standing of professionalism itself needs to adapt, to recognize the importance
of a growing body of workers at the `edge'. Francis recognizes early on that
`edginess' itself is a usefully mutable metaphor, capable of capturing both
those who are `cutting edge in the work they do', and those who are on the
margins of professional identity and `jurisdiction' (p. 7). However, Francis's
thesis is not simply that the edge is an interesting if sometimes very
challenging (and under-researched) place to be; rather, he asserts that it is
crucial to understanding the transformation of legal services because `it is
those at the periphery who have the capacity to drive forward changes'
(p. 30).
These themes cut across the substantive chapters. Marginality is thus
explored in each of chapters three, four, five, and six. It emerges as a status
or condition conferred by those already within the core professions on those
who are not: those `outsider' law students' seeking access to the profession
(chapter three), or legal executives who have spent most of their history
being characterized as a subordinate profession to solicitors (chapter four).
But it may also be chosen, as chapter five shows, by those who, as cause
lawyers, create for themselves an activist-lawyer identity that deliberately
positions them at the edge of mainstream practice, or as part of a contingent
or multi-faceted professional identity that emerging, multi-disciplinary,
specialisms are creating for themselves (chapter six, on wealth profes-
sionals). Chapters five, six, and seven also focus on the part played by those
who are engaged, in different ways, in cutting-edge work. The Vancouver
cause lawyers examined in chapter five (the only chapter to focus on work
exclusively conducted outside United Kingdom jurisdictions
1
) are also edgy
486
1 This is, perhaps not surprisingly, the one chapter where the coherence of the
collection seems at its least convincing. While Francis is aware of the problem, and
argues that, while the Pivot case is of limited applicability to the United Kingdom, it
ß2012 The Author. Journal of Law and Society ß2012 Cardiff University Law School
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