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Abstract:
In 1991, Galanter and Palay published 'Tournament of Lawyers: The Transformation of the Big Law Firm', which documented the regular and relentless growth of large U.S. law firms. The book advanced several structural and historical factors to explain these patterns, centering on the adoption of the promotion-to-partnership tournament. Systemic changes in the marketplace for corporate legal services in the intervening years suggest the need for an updated account of the modern large law firm.

Using 'Tournament of Lawyers' as a starting point, we propose to fill this void in the literature. Marching through a wide array of empirical evidence covering the last twenty to thirty years, our findings corroborate some of the core theoretical insights of 'Tournament of Lawyers'. For example, the continuous upward growth of the partnership based on the tournament is clearly evidenced by a 'smooth' upward trajectory in the partnership ranks while associate hiring hews more closely to the underlying business cycle. On the other hand, the widening ranks of permanent 'off track' attorneys and non-equity partners, including the prevalence of de-equitizations, suggest the emergence of a more complex and elongated tournament structure that applies to both partners and associates.

Under a new model, which we dub the 'elastic tournament,' the equity core is primarily reserved for partners who control access to key clients. This structure reduces cross-subsidies between lawyers with differential value to the firm, thus reducing the potential for large-scale lateral defections. Yet, this reduced sharing of risks and benefits simultaneously creates an environment in which it becomes more costly - at the individual lawyer level - to faithfully adhere to professional and ethics principles that are in tension with client objectives. Arguably, these dynamics have made zealous advocacy the touchstone of ethical lawyering. The diminution in sharing also reduces the time horizons of individual lawyers and decreases their willingness to invest in firmwide initiatives that do not simultaneously optimize their own practice. Amidst this widening collective action problem, the 'firm' itself has remarkably little autonomy to pursue non-economic objectives, such as racial and gender diversity (particularly efforts directed at retention) or the training and mentoring of the next generation of lawyers. Further, except in some exceptional cases, the influence of firm culture, which may have moderated lawyer self-interest in an earlier era, is weakened by the sheer size and geographic dispersion of the modern big law firm.

Although this model is fundamentally 'stable' in the economic sense, it raises several philosophical and practical issues regarding lawyer independence and the long-term viability of professional self-regulation.

Tournament, Am Law 100, Am Law 200, Law Firms, Partners, Associates, Human Capital

Abstract:
India is rightly acclaimed for achieving a flourishing constitutional order, presided over by an inventive and activist judiciary, aided by a proficient bar, supported by the state and cherished by the public. At the same time, the courts, and tribunals where ordinary Indians might go for remedy and protection, are beset with massive problems of delay, cost, and ineffectiveness. Potential users avoid the courts; in spite of a longstanding reputation for litigiousness, existing evidence suggests that Indians avail themselves of the courts at a low rate, and the rate appears to be falling. Still, the courts remain gridlocked. There is wide agreement that access to justice in India requires reforms that would enable ordinary people to invoke the remedies and protections of the law. In this study we focus on an innovative forum, introduced just twenty years ago, which has enjoyed substantial governmental and judicial support and is endorsed and promoted, indeed given pride of place by influential elites, as a promising avenue of access to justice. This forum is the Lok Adalat, literally people's court, and as the name suggests it is promoted as having a different source and character than the courts of the state. In fact, the Lok Adalat is a creature of the state, but because of the pretension that it is not, it deserves examination under the rubric of an alternative, non-state justice system. We suspect that a number of the inhabitants of that category bear a similar ambivalent relationship to the state.

This Article will proceed in the following manner: Part I recounts the post-Independence movement to establish village-based courts as a key method of enlarging public access to justice. After discussing the setbacks this movement encountered, we contrast the top-down public interest litigation approach that emerged in the wake of the Emergency period (1975-1977). In Part II we focus on how, beginning in the 1980s, judges and politicians returned to the captivating idea of settling disputes in an indigenous, traditional manner at the grassroots level. During this time, the concept of the Lok Adalat started gaining significant momentum, and we discuss the reasons why so many supported expanding this alternative dispute institution throughout India. In Part III we present findings from our preliminary observations of several different types of Lok Adalats. We conclude that the claim that this forum offers participants speedy, fair, and deliberative justice needs serious reconsideration.

Abstract:
IIn this study, we use the University of Michigan Law School Alumni Data Set to undertake an empirical analysis of the impact of gender on the legal profession and the differences that gender makes in the careers and lives of attorneys. With regular survey responses from Michigan alumni from 1967 until the present, the University of Michigan Law School Alumni Data Set provides a unique opportunity to examine these questions from the days when female attorneys were rare, to the arrival of the first generation of women to achieve significant presence in the legal profession.

The entry of women into the legal profession has forever changed both lawyers and the legal profession. Women have brought to the profession a different set of assets and problems than men. Although there is of course tremendous overlap in personal characteristics between the genders, on average the women report that they are more desirous of social change, compassionate, honest and liberal than the men. On the other hand the men report that they have a greater desire for money and are more confident, better dealmakers and more aggressive than the women.

Moreover, because of their different roles in courtship and the family, men and women lawyers tend to have different family characteristics and tend to address the problem of accommodating work and family in different ways. The men are more likely to be married, have a spouse who focuses on childcare and have more children while the women are more likely to have a spouse with an intense job and enjoy much higher spousal income. In balancing productivity in the workplace and the home, the men work 32.7% more hours outside the home than the women fifteen years out of law school while by this same time the women are more than twelve times as likely to have taken time off from paid work to do childcare. Among the 3.2% of men and 39.6% of women who have either not worked or worked part time to do childcare by fifteen years out of law school, the average number of months they have taken reduced paid work to do childcare is 23 for the men and 58 for the women - or almost 5 years!

These differences in personal and family characteristics, and in particular whether the attorney takes time away from paid work to do childcare, can have an enormous impact on a person's career. Reflecting their different levels of desire for money and social change, and their different commitments to childcare, men are more likely to go into private practice and business, while women are more likely to go into corporate counsel positions, government work, public interest work and legal education. Within practice, men are disproportionately drawn to specialties and activities that yield high income while women are drawn to specialties and activities that yield predictable and lower hours. On average, men with children who have not taken time away from paid work to do childcare work the most hours in a year (2520) followed by men and women who do not have kids (2341), men who have taken time away from paid work to do childcare (2092), women with kids who have not taken time away from paid work to do childcare (1908) and women who have taken time away from paid work to do childcare (1328). Men are more likely to enter and stay in private practice, and to be a partner fifteen years after law school, but in taking account of family situation we find that men who have missed paid work to do childcare are the least likely group to remain in private practice and be a partner, followed by women who have missed paid work to do childcare. Our logistic regression of the probability of being a partner shows an insignificantly negative effect for being a woman, but this effect is disproportionately borne by women who do childcare who suffer a disadvantage similar to that of men who do childcare.

This myriad of decisions and events over the course of their careers results in significant differences in income and career satisfaction between men and women. Although they begin the practice of law with only a small difference in their average income, by fifteen years after law school women on average earn significantly less a year ($132,170) than men ($229,529). However, our means and regression analysis suggest that, once again, the impact of lower income is disproportionately borne by women who do childcare, who suffer a disadvantage similar to that of men who do childcare. In our regression analysis, only women who have done childcare show a significantly negative impact on income and that impact is similar to the negative impact on income suffered by men who have done childcare. However, the reward for women who do childcare is that they enjoy significantly higher career satisfaction and satisfaction with their work/family balance than the men, or the women who do not do childcare. The impact of childcare on men's career satisfaction is mixed and less clear, but men who do childcare do report being significantly more satisfied with their work/family balance than the men or women who have not missed paid work to do childcare.

Legal Profession, Income, Job Satisfaction, Empirical, Gender, Women, Men

Abstract:
Law and society and law and economics are the oldest and most institutionalized of the 'law ands.' In their break with the mainstream doctrinal study of law, law and society and law and economics share a number of features. As descendants of American Legal Realism, they share a the conviction that legal scholarship (and law) will be enriched by the application of social science. While law and society and law and economics differ fundamentally in their units of analysis and their models of human decision-making, these differences lie within a shared social scientific framework. The emergence of scholarship that draws upon both traditions suggests that rich areas of collaboration wait to be explored. Perhaps it is time for law and society and law and economics to appreciate their complementarity and forsake the narcissism of small differences that has kept them apart.

society, economics, realism, models, postmodern, critical, science, doctrinal

Abstract:
In this article, Professor Marc Galanter challenges the notion that increases in the caseload of the federal courts reflect a general increased litigiousness on the part of the American public. He examines civil filings in federal district courts in six categories of cases that he calls the 'Big Six': civil rights, prisoner petitions, social security, recovery (mainly recovery of overpayments of veterans' benefits and of defaulted student loans), other contracts, and torts. He finds that the increase in litigation is not general over these areas; instead, the incidence of some kinds of cases is growing while that of others is falling. Professor Galanter suggest that different subpopulations of cases respond to specific conditions rather than to global changes and that control of the federal court caseload requires study of these conditions and of the effects on litigation that the cases themselves have.

federal courts, increased litigation, litigation, caseload

Abstract:
Law and social science took shape as a field of inquiry in the third quarter of the past century, an era of expanding rights and remedies and optimism about the capacity of law, government, and social science to address intractable social problems. It put down vigorous institutional roots in organizations, publications, teaching, and research that enabled it to survive the erosion of the reformist soil that nurtured it and to adapt to a new era in which the prevailing common sense is a jaundiced view that emphasizes the weaknesses, costs, and dangers of law. A significant body of research has rebutted many of the components of the jaundiced view, but with little effect on the prevailing folklore. The legal system's distinctive susceptibility to such misreadings and misrepresentations is aggravated by a late and weak development of empirical knowledge and a lack of credible guardians of its knowledge base.

law schools, legal knowledge, lawyers, expansion of remedies, legalization

Abstract:
Contemporary discourse about the civil justice system is laced with a set of resilient legends that are often mistaken for the products of systematic social inquiry. Many of these legends are connected with the "jaundiced view" that derides the civil justice system as unfair and mischievous. The prominence of the jaundiced view and the persistence of these legal legends are supported by a deficient knowledge base in conjunction with cognitive biases, media distortions, professional and political opportunism, interacting with the inherent indeterminacy of the legal system, and general ambivalence about the expansion of remedy.