Documents lawyer 28 results

"Digital workplace technologies have created a connectivity paradox in professional workplace settings. These technologies allow professionals greater spatial-temporal control over their work, but also elevate expectations regarding responsiveness outside of working hours. This study examines how lawyers in Australia understand and navigate the connectivity paradox, given the rapid expansion of digital technologies during and after the Covid-19 pandemic. We find that many lawyers experience digitally enabled flexibility as a welcome and emancipatory removal of gendered participation barriers and a potential facilitator of gender equality in the profession. At the same time, the intensity of work and pressure to be constantly connected means that digital presenteeism may be replacing physical presenteeism, reinforcing expectations of ultralong working hours and further eroding gender equality in the profession. Our study underscores the need for regulatory interventions, such as a ‘right to disconnect', to balance the benefits of digital flexibility with protections against overwork."

This work is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

"The authors study an international law firm that changed its compensation plan for team leaders to address a multitasking problem: Team leaders were focusing their effort on billable hours and not spending sufficient time on leadership activities to build the firm. Compensation was changed to provide greater incentives for the leadership activities and weaker incentives for billable hours. The effect of this change on the task allocation of the firm's team leaders was large and robust; team leaders increased their non-billable hours and shifted billable hours to team members. The firm's new compensation plan (combining an objective formula with subjective evaluations) is the fastest-growing compensation system among law firms today."

"We assess frequently-advanced arguments that automation will soon replace much of the work currently performed by lawyers. Our assessment addresses three core weaknesses in the existing literature: (i) a failure to engage with technical details to appreciate the capacities and limits of existing and emerging software; (ii) an absence of data on how lawyers divide their time among various tasks, only some of which can be automated; and (iii) inadequate consideration of whether algorithmic performance of a task conforms to the values, ideals and challenges of the legal profession.

Combining a detailed technical analysis with a unique data set on time allocation in large law firms, we estimate that automation has an impact on the demand for lawyers' time that while measureable, is far less significant than popular accounts suggest. We then argue that the existing literature's narrow focus on employment effects should be broadened to include the many ways in which computers are changing (as opposed to replacing) the work of lawyers. We show that the relevant evaluative and normative inquiries must begin with the ways in which computers perform various lawyering tasks differently than humans. These differences inform the desirability of automating various aspects of legal practice, while also shedding light on the core values of legal professionalism."

"The authors study the sources of match-specific value at large U.S. law firms by analyzing how graduates of law schools group into law firms. They measure the degree to which lawyers from certain schools concentrate within certain firms and then analyze how this agglomeration can be explained by “natural advantage'' factors (such as geographic proximity) and by productive complementarities across graduates of a given school. Large law firms tend to hire from a select group of law schools, and individual offices within these firms are substantially more concentrated in terms of hires from particular schools. The degree of concentration is highly variable, as there is substantial variation in firms' hiring strategies. Two main drivers of variation in law school concentration occur within law offices. First, geography drives a large amount of concentration, as most firms hire largely from local schools. Second, school-based networks (and possibly productive complementarities) appear to be important because partners' law schools drive associates' law school composition even when controlling for firm, school, and firm/school match characteristics and when instrumenting for partners' law schools."

"In this article, the authors argue that offshoring of legal work from the United States has contributed to the fracturing of the long-established internal labor market arrangements in large U.S. law firms. Drawing on evidence from the United States and India on legal employment, the growth of offshoring, and the rapidly changing nature of work that is offshored, the authors contend that the changes in employment systems in law firms are likely to be permanent, in contrast to other researchers who suggest they are temporary adjustments to the financial crisis. As U.S. law firms are dismantling their internal labor market systems, Indian law firms are partially recreating them."

"Drawing on the boundary theory (Nippert-Eng, 1996a) and the concept of institutional framework according to Piszczek and Berg (2014), we explore in this paper the link between institutional settings and boundary management practices in the case of self-employed German lawyers. Qualitative empirical results on the basis of 12 interviews reveal that the institutional context in case of self-employed lawyers combine “discretionary”, “bureaucratic” and “greedy” (Nippert-Eng, 1996a) elements which consist of legal requirements, expectations of clients and family-related demands. Ways of dealing with institutional requirements (complying, resisting, and negotiating) in terms of boundary management of self-employed lawyers are discussed."

"This paper describes a case study of a particular form of knowledge worker; lawyers, and their efforts to achieve collective bargaining. Within self-regulated professions like law, the professional regulatory body controls much of the labour process and defines the body of professional knowledge. Apprenticeships, such as clinical locums in medicine and articles in law, play an important role in the transfer of labour process norms. However, more and more professionals seek employment in large organizations where the autonomy historically enjoyed by the self-employed worker and crafted in the confines of mentorships is increasingly subject to bureaucratic and administrative controls. In large employment settings rules and policies may interfere with workers' exercise of professional discretion and full utilization of their knowledge. The result of the erosion of traditional labour process power under bureaucratic forms of organization leads professionals to seek alternate forms of control. Many turn to collective bargaining as a mean to wrest back control over the application of discretionary judgment from large, often public sector, employers.In the case of the legal profession in Canada, a great many lawyers are employed in the public sector. The subspecialty of criminal prosecution was broadly framed as a service private sector lawyers once provided on a fee-for-service basis, but until relatively recently it was not a distinct area of practice to which one dedicated a career. The regularization of prosecution in the public sector results in a strong sense of occupational community among public prosecutors. The forces of bureaucratic control and occupational community act together to support collective bargaining among professionals who otherwise have been opposed to this strategy, claiming it is “unprofessional”. "

"This book concerns two men, a stockingmaker and a magistrate, who both lived in a small English village at the turn of the nineteenth century. It focuses on Joseph Woolley the stockingmaker, on his way of seeing and writing the world around him, and on the activities of magistrate Sir Gervase Clifton, administering justice from his country house Clifton Hall. Using Woolley's voluminous diaries and Clifton's magistrate records, Carolyn Steedman gives us a unique and fascinating account of working-class living and loving, and getting and spending. Through Woolley and his thoughts on reading and drinking, sex, the law and social relations, she challenges traditional accounts which she argues have overstated the importance of work to the working man's understanding of himself, as a creature of time, place and society. She shows instead that, for men like Woolley, law and fiction were just as critical as work in framing everyday life."

"En Belgique, le secteur de la justice souffre de problèmes structurels qui sont la source de nombreux mouvements de grève dans les prisons depuis plusieurs années. La politique actuelle d'austérité renforce les motifs de mécontentement et les étend à d'autres catégories d'acteurs de la justice, dont les avocats et les magistrats, jusque-là peu enclines à l'action. En deux ans, tous les acteurs de ce secteur se sont mobilisés, soit séparément, soit lors d'une grève commune historique, le 13 décembre 2013."