Legal profession and legal ethics

If the theme of the twentieth century was growth, nowhere was this more evident than in the legal profession itself. At the beginning of the century, there were some one hundred thousand lawyers in the country. At the end of the century, there were about a million – the population had more or less doubled, but the number of lawyers had increased by a factor of ten.

The profession was transformed in other ways as well. At the beginning of the century, the bar was a basically a white male preserve. There were women lawyers and minority lawyers; but freakishly few. By the end of the century, about a quarter of the bar was made up of women, most of them rather young. The number of black lawyers was extremely small in the first half of the century; and black women were even rarer. But black lawyers were in the forefront of the battle for civil rights. In that period black, Hispanic and Asian faces began to appear in the offices of law firms, on the bench and on the law faculties of schools all over the country as well.

What does this army of a million lawyers do? Not all of them practice law. Some, as has always been the case, drift away from the practice – they go into business, politics. The majority, however, do make use of their training. More and more, they practice with other lawyers: in a firm, or partnership. The firms have been steadily growing in size. In 1900 a firm with twenty lawyers was a giant. But by the 1980s, the situation was dramatically different. Baker and Mckenzie had 697 lawyers in 1984. In 2001 it was reported that Baker & Mckenzie had grown to a truly mammoth size: 3117 lawyers.

In the old days, a New York firm was a New York firm, and that was that. At the end of the twentieth century the biggest law firms all had branch offices. Not all lawyers by any means worked for firms. These were also solo practitioners, “in-house” counsel and government lawyers.

By the end of the century, too, lawyers seemed to be everywhere in government and in society. They busied themselves with every conceivable kind of work: merging giant corporations, suing the government, handling cases of child custody, drawing up wills or handling a real estate deal. They gave advice to people who wanted to open a pizza parlor or set up a private foundation.

In 1908 the American Bar Association adopted a canon of professional ethics. Most states accepted it as the official rules on the conduct of lawyers. Some bar associations or state judges had nominal or real power to enforce these canons and discipline black sheep in the profession. Many of the canons were rules of plain common sense or ordinary morality. No lawyer was supposed to steal his client’s money. But other rules reflected the norms and ambitions of the elite members of the bar. No lawyer, for example, was allowed to use circulars or advertisements. Wall Street lawyers never advertised; big firms had no need to. Other canons of ethics were simply anticompetitive. The rules basically outlawed price-cutting. Bar associations set minimum fees and they fought against unauthorized practice, that is, defended their turf against other professionals. They wanted to keep others off their turf. They wanted a monopoly over all activities that could reasonably be defined as the practice of law.

At the end of the century Wall Street lawyers still do not advertise. But it is now common to see lawyers on television, selling themselves like pizza parlors and used-car dealers, scrambling for low-income clients facing drunk driving charges or people with whiplash injuries or aliens in trouble with immigration authorities.

TASK 10. Answer the following questions:

1) How many were there women lawyers and minority lawyers at the beginning and at the end of the twentieth century?

2) What do lawyers do in the twentieth century?

3) Why did canon of professional ethics reflect the norms and ambitions of the elite members of the bar?

TASK 11. Explain the meaning of the following words and expressions:

• to appear on the bench

• to drift away from the practice

• drunk driving charges

• whiplash injuries

• to outlaw price-cutting

• solo practitioners

• “in-house” counsel

• merging giant corporations

• suing the government

• handling cases of child custody

• drawing up wills

• handling a real estate deal

TASK 12. The word BAR has the following meanings in legal Russian:

1. барьер, за которым находится суд или подсудимый

2. суд в полном составе, судебное присутствие

3. адвокатура, коллегия адвокатов

4. правовое препятствие

5. пресекать, препятствовать

Match the following English expressions with their Russian equivalents:

1) bar and bench 2) at bar 3) to call to the bar 4) to bar evidence 5) to keep behind bars 6) to bar proceedings 7) to bar prosecution 8) to put behind bars 9) bar of the court

a) препятствовать допущению в качестве доказательства b) адвокаты, допущенные к выступлениям в данном суде c) заключить в тюрьму d) адвокаты и судьи e) принять в коллегию адвокатов f) находящийся на рассмотрении суда g) препятствовать возбуждению уголовного преследования h) содержать в тюрьме i) препятствовать возбуждению судебного преследования

TASK 13. Study the text below, making sure you fully comprehend it. Where appropriate, consult English-Russian dictionaries and/or other references & source books on law.