The size and scope of global law firms has made them difficult to encompass within a single regulatory jurisdiction. As the UK government sought to take control of the legal profession and market by removing self-regulation and introducing external regulation under the Legal Services Act, the large law firms were able to countermand the new regime. Through a combination of associations like CityUK, the City of London Law Society, as well as through individual firms, large law firms lobbied successfully to reinstate a new form of self-regulation known as AIR. The elites of the legal profession constructed a new logic of professionalism that accorded with the firms’ ideologies and government’s market-oriented objectives. Further attempts to consolidate their position at the EU and at the GATS levels are still in negotiation. Despite the legal market shifting to a more diffuse combination of actors, of which lawyers are only a segment, elite law firms have apparently strengthened their hold.
PrologueOver the last 30 years professions have been subject to searching critiques; nothing about them is taken for granted anymore. The legal profession, as one of the trinity of original professions, has been mired in controversy as critics have deconstructed its values and objectives. Although for some the criticism has sounded like a jeremiad and they have attempted to resurrect professions as benign markers of sociality, the agnostics are in the ascendant.1 Underpinning the social cohesion of professions with society is the educational process through which new professionals are initiated. The critique of professions has enveloped all aspects of professionalisation including education and training, which poses massive challenges to the approach to knowledge creation taken by professions. 2 In this article we consider the institutional dimensions of professionalism and the ways that the legal profession, as a modern institution, grapples with the challenges of postmodernity.Postmodern theorists observed that radical changes in socio-economic organization presented by post-industrial capitalism in the second half of the 20 th century threatened our prevailing conceptions of knowledge. As societies became bureaucratised and imbued with notions of controlled consumption, they fractured the dominant cultural and aesthetic values and revolutionised the way learning was acquired, classified, made available and exploited. 3 For Lyotard, for example, the correlation between the acquisition of knowledge and the training of minds was obsolete. 4 Furthermore, as Lyotard and Foucault hypothesised, the linkages between power and knowledge were fundamental to understanding the processes of modernization. This is perceived in Foucault's focus on the role of types of knowledge in supporting the rise of impersonal networks of disciplinary power, 5 and in Lyotard's view that knowledge is a key component in the competition for power. The article examines three aspects of the concerns thrown up by the TFR. In the first part we analyse the structure and drivers of the TFR, where they have come from and how they will be articulated. Secondly, we consider the TFR in the light of the context of the political economy of higher education and its role in the new capitalism. Finally, we examine the potential effects of the TFR for the legal profession from the perspective of deprofessionalisation and also for the Law Society itself, whether it can retain a key role in the life course of the legal profession.
The Context of the Training Framework ReviewSeen in a historical perspective, the TFR proposals are evolutionary rather than
Features Of The Proposed FrameworkThe TFRG's proposed outcomes are organised in four groups. Group A outcomes comprise the intellectual, analytical and problem solving skills delivered in honours degrees, together with a core of legal knowledge that reworks the current seven Although it considered that some of the Group D outcomes could only be delivered during the period of work-based learning, most were ...
Apparently naive, but in fact not, is the question: What do lawyers do? Many scholars assume the central role of the lawyer is that of the advocate, but among lawyers working in law firms advocacy consumes little of their time. Similarly, the term lawyer provides hardly any meaning in itself. The research presented here is based on a participant-observation study of a corporate law firm. The central thesis proposed, in the light of case studies of the selling of shopping mall and the arranging of a bank loan, is that business lawyers are engaged in managing uncertainty for both their clients and themselves. Managing uncertainty is accomplished through interaction rather than appeals to the law.
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