REVIEWS
| Date | 01 May 1990 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2230.1990.tb01824.x |
| Published date | 01 May 1990 |
REVIEWS
R.L.
Abel,
The
Legal
Profession
in
England and
Wales,
Oxford: Blackwell, 1988,548 pp,
hb f40.00.
J.
Pritchard,
The Legal Five Hundred,
London: Legalease, 1989, 352 pp, hb f24.95.
J.
Slinn,
A
History of Freshfields,
London: Freshfields, 1989, 208 pp, hb no price.
J.
Slinn,
Linklaters and Paines: The First One Hundred and Fifty Years,
London:
Longman, 1989, 260 pp, hb f25.00.
The legal profession has taken off as an area of interest in its own right. After years of
constipated discussion regarding fusion and unmet legal need, the markets for lawyers
have changed, and government has included the legal profession among its numerous targets
for deregulation and the encouragement of competition. Academically, the profession has
been a much understudied subject in the United Kingdom, compared with the much wider
area of literature existing in the United States. Empirical observation of lawyers’
performance of their tasks has begun here as well as analysis of some of the markets for
legal services and the effects of competition on them. Sociology of the profession is still
largely in its infancy although some earlier work and some isolated articles have begun
to enunciate aspects of theory.
This particular basket of books reflects both the newborn interest of academics in the
profession and of the profession in understanding itself. Abel’s book is clearly the most
important
of
the four in academic terms, but the other three exhibit elements adverted
to by Abel and further developed in the period since his book was written. None of the
works here reviewed were written in contemplation, or even
in
furtherance, of the proposed
reorganisation and changes in the legal profession heralded by the Lord Chancellor’s Green
and White papers of January and July 1989 or the Courts and Legal Services Bill which
followed.
The areas covered by the four
books
are
as follows. Abel’s learned text presents a theory
for the sociology of the profession aiming to explain the structure, size, internal organisation
and hierarchy of the profession through its control of the producers and of the work
produced. The two books by Judy Slinn chart the history of two of the largest of the ‘city’
firms that now all but monopolize the legal scene. Pritchard’s
The
Legal
Five Hundred
is both a product of the competitive environment among larger law firms and an attempt
to fertilize that environment with facts and figures about the top five hundred solicitors
firms
in
the
country. It is also a first attempt to produce a detailed ‘peer review’ assessment
of the quality of firms operating in different areas of legal work.
Pritchard and Slinn provide a much needed insight into the internal workings of major
firms, which have, until recently, been very much a closed society, hiding themselves
and their work behind the veil of client confidentiality. These firms have been brought
out of Purdah by the new need to broadcast their services and abilities to the potential
client market and by the need to attract large numbers of well qualified and ‘appropriate’
applicants for the articled clerkships that provide the major staffing for each firm.
But first to Abel. His book is part of a massive international project, taking place under
the aegis of the Working Group for the Comparative Study of Legal Professions initiated
by Philip Lewis of All
Souls
College, Oxford. A number of
books
and articles have already
been published covering the legal profession
in
some twenty countries. Much of the material
in the book has been expressed in more piecemeal fashion by Abel in the course of his
writings over the last ten years, some of which have been published in this
Review.
This
book brings those writings together into a more coherent picture.
Abel’s is a massive work, involving 308 pages of text and 240 pages of tables of statistics
and indexes. As such it will be useful not least for the detailed research which it makes
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