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Changing Nature of Law Practice

"The chief forum of the lawyer," proclaimed an article in the American Lawyer of 1893, "has been transferred from the court house to the office. Litigation has declined, and counsel work has become the leading feature of practice." 2 Prior to the Civil War, law offices had been small, composed of an attorney and one or two clerks. Even as late as 1930 most lawyers still practiced alone or with one partner, but fifty years earlier a new path of professional practice had appeared. The careers of lawyers shifted at the end of the nineteenth century from solo practice and partnership to the law firm. The rise of the law firm was a response to industrialization. Through the mid- nineteenth century the problems raised in the law had been relatively simple, and the situations that surrounded them could be understood by the lay public. The best lawyers were generalists, and their role was to provide legal representation in court in response to a variety of legal problems.

By the 1870s, however, the traditional features of law practice faded, beginning in the industrializing Northeast and Midwest and extending, eventually, to the entire nation by 1920. The role of the lawyer evolved from advocate to counsel, and lawyers began to specialize, doing so out of the necessity of being competitive in a legal culture that was demanding increasing knowledge of practitioners.

Nowhere was this change more dramatic than in the growth of what were for that time large law firms, those with five or more members. The appearance of these firms changed the overall shape of the legal elite. Although the lawyers in these firms were an infinitesimal percentage of all lawyers in the country (less than 0.5 percent in 1898 and only 1.3 percent in 1915), the growth of large firms far exceeded that of the profession as a whole. For example, in the cities of New York, Boston, and Chicago between 1900 and 1915 the growth rate for all lawyers was 1.7 percent, whereas lawyers in large firms in these cities increased at an annual rate of 6.7 percent. 3

The trend toward large firms was a response to industrialization and urbanization.

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Large firms filled the needs of corporations that were increasing in complexity and number. The fastest rate of growth in large firms occurred during the 1890s, the same period in which business corporations underwent sweeping consolidation through mergers. Although every large firm had corporate clients, not all large firms specialized in corporate law. Many listed themselves as engaged in general practice, noting on their letterheads the clients whom they served as references. And within these large firms the individual practitioners still counted for a good deal. Elihu Root, one of the turn-of-the-century's most famous Wall Street lawyers, earned between $50,000 and $110,000 per year, personally supervising a variety of legal operations for a host of corporate clients that his firm served. That firm, however, consisted of three to five partners and no associates throughout the 1890s.



The trend toward bigness also encouraged the creation of the factory system of law practice, which the firm of Paul D. Cravath in New York City pioneered. In the 1890s Cravath brought his organizational genius to the practice of law. He hired only young lawyers who had graduated from both college and law school, preferably with high scholastic marks from elite universities. The young lawyers, who had driving and forceful personalities, were paid a salary as associates of the firm. In addition, Cravath organized the office routine of the firm, creating files, ordering typewriters, and hiring stenographers and copyists. Once organized, the Cravath system, which by the 1920s was solidly entrenched in the United States, "churned out anonymous organization men, steadfastly loyal to the firm that had hired them." 4 After a five-year probationary period, the brightest advanced to partnership, which entitled them to take a share of the firm's profits. The returns were lucrative. While two-thirds of the lawyers practicing in New York City at the end of the nineteenth century earned about three thousand dollars annually, those practicing in the large firms molded on the Cravath system could expect to earn triple that amount. But barriers to access became "more formidable as the desirability of access increased." 5 Perseverance and integrity were not enough; the best opportunities in the new-learned profession of the law depended on Anglo-Saxon, upper class, Protestant, and Ivy League educational credentials.

Even though relatively few lawyers joined law-firm factories, this new mode of organization dominated the professional landscape of twentieth-century cities such as New York, Chicago, and San Francisco, which offered lucrative opportunities in corporation and finance law. As these firms grew in number the traditional view of law practice faded. The nineteenth-century image of the law as a learned profession, with all that it implied in personal deference and respect, social prestige, and cultural power, dissolved before the new and impersonal system. The leading lawyers of the new regime were negotiators and facilitators, and practical men of business who knew the uses and the means of wealth.

While large law firms and law factories became the paradigm of practice, great diversity existed among practitioners. If Elihu Root earned $100,000 a year on Wall Street in 1900, most of his contemporaries earned between $2000 and $5000. In California, for example, the bar during the late nineteenth century steadily moved from a frontier to an urban setting, with lawyers following "the practice of the dollar and some specializ[ing] to meet the needs of a rapidly urbanizing and industrializing population." 6 The pattern in California was the pattern of developing legal practice everywhere. First land, then laws and administrative regulations, and later corporations and industry provided lawyers with opportunities for profitable practices.

Wherever they were, lawyers adapted to new social and economic circumstances.

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Even in the South, where an idealized past held sway, the bar responded to the new currents of change. Virginia lawyers, for example, between 1870 and 1900 remained "provincially oriented and steeped in the rural-planter tradition." 7 The solo practitioner and dual partnership that provided general legal services to the agriculture-based economy remained dominant throughout the period, but attorneys in the region were also responsible for the growing consensus about nonagricultural economic development. The first four-person firm did not appear in Virginia until 1901. Yet by the turn of the century in Virginia and elsewhere in the South, lawyers were clustering in cities, and the demands of corporations invited them to specialize in their practices.

 


Date: 2015-01-29; view: 861


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