Richard Moorhead, Steven Vaughan, and Cristina Godinho: In‐House Lawyers’ Ethics: Institutional Logics, Legal Risk and the Tournament of Influence
| Author | Lynn Mather |
| Date | 01 December 2019 |
| Published date | 01 December 2019 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/jols.12197 |
IN-HOUSE LAWYERS' ETHICS: INSTITUTIONAL LOGICS, LEGAL RISK
AND THE TOURNAMENT OF INFLUENCE by RICHARD MOORHEAD,
STEVEN VAUGHAN, AND CRISTINA GODINHO
(Oxford: Hart Publishing, 2019, 264 pp., £55.00)
Having taught a Legal Profession course for many years, I recently noticed
the growing popularity of in-house counsel jobs among my students. In
contrast to the long hours demanded by prestigious Big Law firms or the low
salaries of small firms, in-house counsel appeared to offer the perfect
combination of salary, challenge, and working conditions. Indeed, as
Richard Moorhead, Steven Vaughan, and Cristina Godinho report in their
excellent new book, the job has been transformed from low-level service
provider to one with status, power, and position. Lawyers working in-house
report that their work is `better' than private practice because of their broad
responsibilities and greater influence over outcomes (p. 51). Indeed, in-house
counsel now constitute one-fifth of all practicing solicitors in England and
Wales. But, what exactly is their role and, more importantly, how do in-
house lawyers balance client and public interests? In-House Lawyers' Ethics
seeks to answer those questions through rigorous qualitative and quantitative
research.
The book `represents the most detailed profiling of in-house lawyers
undertaken anywhere' (p. 27) and I heartily concur. The data consists of
semi-structured interviews with 67 in-house counsel and compliance officers
(done in 2013 and 2016) and a survey of 400 in-house lawyers. The
Solicitors Regulation Authority and several other lawyer organizations
contacted all registered in-house lawyers in England and Wales to request
participation in the authors' online survey. Although the response rate was
quite low (1.5 per cent), the respondents did appear to be generally
representative of the target population in terms of gender, work experience,
and type of workplace. The survey explored lawyer demographics and
careers, employer organizations and reporting lines, and numerous questions
were designed to measure role identity and professional orientation. The
answers were then analysed using psychometric techniques to identify five
distinct role identities and three professional orientations. These distinctions
prove to be useful in explaining variation in how in-house counsel
understand their roles. (I am curious to know, however, how long the
survey took to complete and whether that would explain the unusually low
response rate.)
First, by firmly grounding their research in the existing American,
Canadian, and British literature on in-house counsel, Moorhead et al. have
produced a rich and comprehensive study, one that also allows them to
showcase their own contributions to the field. For example, Robert Nelson
and Laura Beth Nielsen's well-known article on United States in-house
counsel distinguished among three ideal types: `cops, counsel, and entre-
691
ß2019 The Author. Journal of Law and Society ß2019 Cardiff University Law School
To continue reading
Request your trial