In the last 25 years, there has been an unprecedented surge of lawyers in Canada and the United States. Accompanying this growth has been a body of sociolegal scholarship devoted to understanding the repercussions of this expansion. An early contribution to this field of study was Reference Heinz and LaumanHeinz and Laumann's Chicago Lawyers (1982). In Urban Lawyers: The New Social Structure of the Bar, Heinz et alia revisit and extend this earlier work, seeking to understand how recent structural and demographic changes in the Chicago bar have shaped lawyers' lives, legal organizations, and the social organization of the legal profession.
Heinz et alia's insights are derived from a comparison of two surveys of the Chicago bar. The first was conducted with 777 lawyers in 1975, a time when the legal profession was on the cusp of change but still numerically and demographically stable. By the mid-1990s a different story emerges, which the authors bring to light through their survey of 787 Chicago lawyers conducted in late 1994 and early 1995. The comparative nature of these data are invaluable because they allow the reader to pinpoint how exactly the Chicago bar has changed. This is one of the most important contributions of the book.
Heinz et alia outline various sociodemographic changes in the profession, including the increased involvement of women, African Americans, and Latinos in the 20-year period under study. While these changes are not unique to the legal profession, the authors show that these groups are situated in marginal roles in law firms and are found in lower-status practice settings. This finding lends weight to larger theoretical debates on the ways in which the increased incorporation of women and other minorities in professional occupations reproduces, albeit indirectly, existing systems of social stratification.
Urban Lawyers catalogues the various ways in which the Chicago bar has become more stratified and, in the process, less cohesive. At the professional level, changes are found in the growing divide between prestigious and less-prestigious fields of law, in the increasing corporatization of law firms, in the types of careers that contemporary Chicago lawyers have, and in the levels of remuneration awarded to different categories of lawyers. An interesting finding is that a greater proportion of Chicago lawyers focus their work on corporate clients and, consequently, their economic values have become more conservative, or sympathetic to business interests. This raises intriguing questions about the social consequences of more lawyers devoting more time to work for corporate clients than for personal clients, and the larger implications of greater prestige being awarded to this type of work. This change may reflect the increased prominence of corporate interests in North American society. At the very least, the findings indicate that more research is necessary to understand whether this issue is unique to the Chicago bar.
The authors also examine the community roles that lawyers play, their social networks, and their satisfaction with practicing law. A striking finding is that Chicago lawyers are, on average, a satisfied group. But Heinz et alia find that job satisfaction is lower for lawyers who have experienced diminished control over client choices and increased constraints over the circumstances of their work. While these variations raise questions about the possibility of developing an all-encompassing measure of job satisfaction, they nonetheless play a significant role in introducing more layers of segmentation into the contemporary Chicago bar.
The data in Urban Lawyers are meticulously collected, the findings clearly organized, and a great wealth of information conveyed to the reader. However, the breadth and amount of statistical information presented makes it easy to “lose sight of the forest for the trees.” While Urban Lawyers allows readers to make sense of larger social transformations in the legal profession that took place in this 20-year period, some qualitative insights and anecdotal stories are missing that would put a human face on Chicago lawyers. This would have enhanced the accessibility of the book to a wide range of readers.
Still, the range of territory covered in Urban Lawyers is impressive. This book will be of interest to students and scholars who study lawyers and the legal profession. It will also be of interest to lawyers and law students who want to learn precisely how their chosen profession has changed in recent years. Sociologists who study professional occupations will benefit from reading Urban Lawyers for the insight it provides into larger issues of deprofessionalization and changing conceptions of professional identity. Finally, Urban Lawyers is a useful resource for sociologists interested in larger conversations about the ways in which structural changes in the legal profession are symbolic of concurrent transformations in the neoliberal social and economic regime in which it is embedded.
