The Betrayed Profession
Linowitz, Sol & Mayer, Martin
THE BETRAYED PROFESSION: LAWYERING AT THE END OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY Sol Linowitz, with Martin Mayer Charles Scribner's Sons/273 pages / $25 reviewed by JEROME M. MARCUS M y copy of the most...
...The law itself has changed...
...Without committed clients how can a law firm commit to make partners out of its associates...
...The bottom line of all the anecdotes is that there is now far too much attention paid to the bottom line...
...If he did, I think he would be even sadder than he is...
...Personal bonds tied lawyer and client together more or less permanently...
...Much of its evidence that something is wrong is anecdotal...
...Now he's written this book out of a combination of sadness and anger that such relationships don't exist anymore, and that the practice of law has been poisoned as a result...
...The most accomplished took a leave to go into state or city government, or to Washington, but they came back when they were through and they retired from the firm where they had begun...
...Among young lawyers this view of law practice is predominant...
...L inowitz never asks why the world has changed so much...
...Until at least the end of the Second World War, a lawyer represented clients rather than causes...
...Many were comfortably upper middle class...
...It was not always thus, as Sol Linowitz reminds us...
...His goal was to keep the client out of trouble and to help the client accomplish what he wanted so long as it was legal...
...only a lucky few at the top of the totem pole became genuinely rich...
...And they're well paid to boot...
...Litigators can remake the world...
...THE BETRAYED PROFESSION: LAWYERING AT THE END OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY Sol Linowitz, with Martin Mayer Charles Scribner's Sons/273 pages / $25 reviewed by JEROME M. MARCUS M y copy of the most recent American Bar Association Journal has arrived...
...Linowitz would replace this world with another, which sounds like a very nice place...
...How could they possibly keep the same lawyer...
...and the unelected lawyers who do that work hold political power...
...The gender discrimination laws now officially make it illegal to act or speak on the basis of outmoded (that is, traditional) conceptions of men's and women's roles...
...legislators can do even more...
...It is, in essence, the world of the guild, a place where lawyers don't compete with one another both because they have their minds on finer things than money and because they have strong personal ties to their clients...
...He wants every lawyer to be forced to do pro bono work or give money to other lawyers who do...
...what courts do is dramatically more important than it was when Linowitz was a young man...
...By billing too much, trying too hard to market themselves, cutting too close to the law's edge to please a client, filing class actions on behalf of clients they barely know, and—more generally—representing clients in a single deal or suit instead of for a lifetime, lawyers have cheapened their profession so they can make more money at it...
...He acknowledges a risk that such work can be driven by the "social agenda . . created by poverty lawyers" rather than focusing "on the rights and remedies of individuals," but he views this as a minor problem...
...Blackmun is beloved of the ABA for his willingness to use constitutional litigation to advance the country "down the road toward the full emancipation of women" (as he explained the goal of his opinion in Roe)—and toward improving conditions for the "little people," as Justice Blackmun's law clerks say he describes the objects of his solicitude...
...0 The American Spectator November 1994 73...
...In part, the problem is that longstanding relationships between any service provider and a client are increasingly rare: in fact, longstanding relationships between anybody and anybody else are uncommon these days...
...He achieved that success within one of those old-time lawyer-client relationships, between himself and his client's chairman...
...He nursed a very small client (the Haloid Corporation) into a very large one 72 The American Spectator November 1994 (Xerox...
...Because this is what's really wrong with the profession, the remedies Linowitz offers would only make things worse...
...It is a world that will never be here again...
...Without a commitment from their clients and partners that they can be assured of a lifetime's work, it's not surprising that people try to make money for themselves...
...And if the associates have nocommitment from their firm, how can they practice as if they lived in the guild-ordered world in which Linowitz matured...
...Use of law as a "tool for social change" is now seen as a good thing...
...It is a world in which lawyers focus on their clients' needs, rather than on an abstract cause, and in which lawyers regulate themselves rigorously out of shared concern for the public's respect for the profession...
...Tocqueville said that in America every problem is eventually a legal problem...
...They don't keep to the same employer, the same house, the same city, or to the same (or any) church...
...But now every legal problem is also a political issue...
...Individual clients stayed with the same lawyer, corporate clients stayed with the same firm, and the young lawyers hired to work in a firm became partners there...
...In fact it is a symptom of the biggest change in law in his lifetime: the increase in lawyers' power...
...The lawyer sought not to move the law but to move the client through the law as smoothly as possible...
...It's no wonder that people are angry at them...
...For some reason, well-intentioned people like our first family can advocate the law's use for this purpose without seeing that the point of this nice-sounding phrase is to use "law"—the thing you must obey or be put in jail—to change people's views of their culture, whom they associate with, what they believe about one another...
...They see the law as a tool for social change—and real power...
...But greed is not the real villain in the story Linowitz is trying to tell...
...Our totally fulJerome M. Marcus is a lawyer living in Philadelphia...
...The Betrayed Profession is far from a systematic work...
...In a world where law can climb into people's heads in this way, who can expect aspiring attorneys to be satisfied helping other people make a will or run a company...
...People don't even keep wives as long as they used to...
...filled first couple are the embodiment of this ideal...
...political issues are worked out in the courts...
...Lawyers have become too greedy, Linowitz says...
...Harry Blackmun, just retired from the Supreme Court after twenty years spent defending his baby—Roe v. Wade—and its progeny, graces the Journal's cover...
...Linowitz was one of the lucky few...
...Why move an individual through a transaction cheaply when you can be a Rousseauian Legislator, remaking the world every time you file a new case or introduce a new bill...
...Ask the nation's law students why they're on their way to the bar, and most will reveal that they are driven by the image of Thurgood Marshall arguing for the plaintiffs in Brown v. Board of Education, or some such simulacrum of crusading...
...If people are moving around so much more, how can an institutional client remain with the same law firm...
Vol. 27 • November 1994 • No. 11
