This issue of The Practice celebrates the recent publication of The Making of Lawyers’ Careers: Opportunity and Inequality in the American Legal Profession (University of Chicago Press, 2023), a monumental research project that examines the careers of lawyers, and how they have navigated the complex systems and hierarchies structuring the profession. Written by Robert L. Nelson, Ronit Dinovitzer, Bryant G. Garth, Joyce S. Sterling, David B. Wilkins, Meghan Dawe, and Ethan Michelson, with contributions from many others, The Making of Lawyers’ Careers builds on a two-decade-plus longitudinal study tracking the careers of lawyers called the After the JD (AJD) project.
Housed at the American Bar Foundation, AJD surveyed a nationally representative sample of lawyers at three points in their career. The 5,000+ lawyers included in the study entered the bar in 2000. Over the course of their careers, these lawyers would experience 9/11, the fall of Lehman Brothers and the ensuing financial crisis, record profits for law firms and similar lows; they would see expanding opportunity in entry-level jobs for women and people of color even while the top of the echelon remained impenetrable for all but white men. The sample of lawyers was first surveyed in 2002 (wave 1) when they were 2-3 years out of law school, then again in 2007 (wave 2) when they were 5-6 years out, and then last in 2012 (wave 3) when they more than a decade into their careers. AJD researchers complemented the surveys with in-depth interviews as well as additional career research to better understand how lawyers made decisions to further their goals and careers. AJD researchers complemented the surveys with in-depth interviews to better understand how lawyers made decisions to further their goals and careers. Together, the quantitative and qualitative research in The Making of Lawyers’ Careers is an important expansion of the existing scholarship on the legal profession. The book reexamines and questions accepted truths in the mythos around lawyers, including the idea that the law is a meritocracy where skill and acumen are the only necessities on the path toward partnership and the impression that lawyers largely lead dissatisfactory lives. This issue of The Practice highlights the integral research that went into AJD and The Making of Lawyers’ Careers while expanding and complementing that work, asking questions about what’s next for the profession, especially given the difficulties of the last five years.
The Making of Lawyers’ Careers: Inequality and Opportunity in the American Legal Profession
“An unprecedented account of social stratification within the US legal profession.”
How do race, class, gender, and law school status condition the career trajectories of lawyers? And how do professionals then navigate these parameters?
The Making of Lawyers’ Careers provides an unprecedented account of the last two decades of the legal profession in the US, offering a data-backed look at the structure of the profession and the inequalities that early-career lawyers face across race, gender, and class distinctions. Starting in 2000, the authors collected over 10,000 survey responses from more than 5,000 lawyers, following these lawyers through the first twenty years of their careers. They also interviewed more than two hundred lawyers and drew insights from their individual stories, contextualizing data with theory and close attention to the features of a market-driven legal profession.
Their findings show that lawyers’ careers both reflect and reproduce inequalities within society writ large. They also reveal how individuals exercise agency despite these constraints.”
(Blurb from the University of Chicago Press website)
This issue of The Practice is modeled after three large themes that organize The Making of Lawyers’ Careers: the structures of lawyers’ careers, the strategies lawyers use to navigate their careers, and inequality in the profession. Each story highlights takeaways from the research while also showcasing an exclusive discussion with one of the authors on the theme.
Exploring structures, we speak with Robert Nelson, professor of sociology and the MacCrate Research Chair at the American Bar Foundation, who details the historical circumstances of the legal profession over the last 50 years and provides grounding for the theoretical frameworks that structure the book, especially diving into the work of John Heinz and Edward Laumann, who posited that the legal profession was structured into two hemispheres: a corporate business sphere (higher, more-elite lawyers) and a personal client sphere (lower-tier lawyers with less elite backgrounds). “Overall, it’s surprising how resilient the difference between the two hemispheres is. They’ve taken on a different shape and a different character, but they’re still very prevalent,” Nelson explains. But, he says, we still must remember one important facet of the book: “There is structure and agency. So individual lawyers, even though they are channeled in distinctive ways over the course of their careers, do have agency in the system. It’s not totally segregated. People can move.”
Exploring strategies, and how lawyers manage their careers in the face of opportunities and obstacles, we speak with Bryant Garth, Distinguished Professor of Law Emeritus at the University of California Irvine School of Law, who explains how the interviews the AJD team conducted provide context to the numbers, showcasing the thoughtfulness and agency with which lawyers navigated opportunities for and barriers to advancement. Looking back at how lawyers have traversed the past hopefully provides direction and strategy to the next generation. As Garth says, “If you learn that these are the paths that you’re preprogrammed to take, you also learn that you can reject it. You don’t have to be pushed by the winds that are blowing everybody else.”
Exploring inequality, we interview Ronit Dinovitzer, professor of sociology at the University of Toronto, who explains that, as long as society is unequal, the legal profession will reflect those underlying logics. But, she says, the profession can make progress on rectifying inequities. Researching the role of inequality and inequity in the legal profession, Dinovitzer identified surprising findings, such as how lawyers, even when they face structural barriers in their career, find rewarding ways to lead their lives. “It turns out that women and people of color, despite experiences of discrimination or unequal pay, still report that they’re happy with their choice to become a lawyer. What this says is, ‘Hey, listen, there are these obstacles, but people are finding fulfilling careers both across demographic categories who experienced discrimination and across practice settings.’”
We conclude this issue with a Speakers’ Corner interview: Mary Smith is the 2023–2024 president of the American Bar Association and the first Native American woman to hold the position. Making the case for why students should continue to pursue law, despite the difficulties of the present moment, she says:
There is no more important time to be a lawyer. The world needs lawyers more than ever to uphold democracy in the face of rising challenges to the rule of law, to champion civil rights in an era of growing social inequality, to navigate the intricacies of international law in a globalized world, and to address the ethical challenges posed by technological innovation to privacy to artificial intelligence. But most importantly, it needs lawyers to give voice to the voiceless.
