The Vanishing American Lawyer

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Over 4,000 lawyers lost their positions at major American law firms in 2008 and 2009. In The Vanishing American Lawyer, Professor Thomas Morgan discusses the legal profession and the need for both law students and lawyers to adapt to the needs and expectations of clients in the future. The world needs people who understand institutions that create laws and how to access those institutions' works, but lawyers are no longer part of a profession that is uniquely qualified to advise on a broad range of distinctly legal questions. Clients will need advisors who are more specialized than many lawyers are today and who have more expertise in non-legal issues. Many of today's lawyers do not have a special ability to provide such services. While American lawyers have been hesitant to change the ways they can improve upon meeting client needs, lawyers in other countries, notably Great Britain and Australia, have been better at adapting. Law schools must also recognize the world their students will face and prepare them to operate successfully within it. Professor Morgan warns that lawyers must adapt to new client needs and expectations. The term "professional" should be applied to individuals who deserve praise for skilled and selfless efforts, but this term may lead to occupational suicide if it becomes a justification for not seeing and adapting to the world ahead.

The Vanishing American Lawyer Review

Law is probably the most studied profession in American sociology, and for good reason: despite widespread concern about an overproduction of lawyers, most personal legal needs remain unmet for the majority of Americans. Part of the reason for the flurry of scholarship on law is that practitioners, like Morgan, have taken an active interest in studying themselves - possibly, I suspect, due to the easy opportunities for publishing in the ever-expanding pages of American law reviews and legal publishing outlets. Consequently, it is very difficult to come up with a truly original take on the profession without original data collection on the magnitude of the Heinz and Laumann or Halliday studies, and therefore I will temper some of my criticism of Morgan's work.

Morgan attempts to make waves by arguing that law, one of the few ideal-type professions identified in the sociological cannon, is actually not a profession at all. However, as one gets deeper into the book, one realizes that he is only referring to what Eliot Freidson calls "social trustee professionalism" - that is, broadly defined, lawyers' commitment to the public interest. Once this became clear, I felt a little disappointed - this is a basic point that has been made time and time again. Coming from sociology, I was expecting a more stinging critique of the bar's social closure practices when I read "not a profession" or an emphasis on how the bar is splitting into "hemispheres". By claiming that law is not a profession in the introduction, Morgan draws in readers but fails to satisfy those looking for a sociological perspective.

The book gets better as it goes on, though. Much of the literature circa 1990-ish predicting that law firms will inevitably diversify is getting a bit dated, and Morgan provides current examples of the trends predicted twenty years ago by scholars like Galander and Abel. It's a bit extreme to claim that American lawyers are "vanishing", but Morgan provides valuable evidence of how technology is changing the nature of work in big firms and interesting speculation on the future of "biglaw". He does not devote much attention to the more depressing topic of the future of American criminal justice and the lack of student interest in public interest work, possibly reflecting his position as a law professor specializing in antitrust and trade, but does provide valuable insight (and hope) for those of us who eagerly await the day when alternative routes into the profession become viable for those committed to fighting injustice.

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