This story introduces and offers important takeaways from The Making of Lawyers’ Careers: Inequality and Opportunity in the American Legal Profession (2023). It does so around the theme of structure and the various ways that idea manifests in the legal profession: from the structure of the profession as a whole to the structure of individual careers to the structural discrimination some face as a result of factors like race, gender, ethnicity, and more. This thematic introduction includes a discussion with one of the authors, Robert Nelson, a professor of sociology at Northwestern University and the MacCrate Research Chair at the American Bar Foundation. This issue also includes discussion around the themes of “inequality” and “strategy.”
In 1975, sociologists John Heinz and Edward Laumann surveyed 777 lawyers from across Chicago to understand the local structure of the legal profession. What they found was not one profession united by a common love of the law, but two divided by clientele. The two-hemispheres thesis, as it came to be called, was organized according to what type of client the lawyers served: The “personal plight sector” included lawyers who primarily represented individuals, in anything from divorce proceedings to real estate transactions to personal injury cases. The “corporate sector” predominantly served business and institutions—these were “elite” jobs and the lawyers in this field often worked for large law firms. The two-hemispheres thesis offers a starting point to the research underpinning The Making of Lawyers’ Careers: Inequality and Opportunity in the American Legal Profession, the book we feature and celebrate in this issue of The Practice. The authors of the book asks, does this structure hold beyond Chicago? Beyond 1975 and a subsequent study in the 1990s? What impact does a structure divided by clientele have on the nature of lawyer careers? And do changes to the profession over the last 50 years challenge its underlying tenets?
In addition to the profession’s organization by clientele, today the legal profession also exists within wider social structures around race, gender, and socioeconomic status. But as the authors of The Making of Lawyers’ Careers underscore, such factors are not necessarily determinative of a lawyer’s career prospects. Instead, individual lawyers can push against these factors. The authors write, “Social hierarchies structure the careers of lawyers. They do not function as a caste system, yet they also do not disappear just because someone has achieved success by beating the odds to obtain a certain position.” Indeed, one can develop a “strategy for … dealing with structural constraints, but it does not break down the structures.” (For more on strategies, see “Strategies for Navigating Lawyers’ Careers.”)
From this context, The Making of Lawyers’ Careers compels readers to assess the dynamic interplay between the systemic forces structuring lawyers’ careers—the hemispheres, race, gender, elite status, religion, socioeconomics, and more—and the strategies deployed by individual lawyers to build their specific careers. To further explore this question, we spoke with Robert Nelson, a coauthor of The Making of Lawyers’ Careers and a principal researcher on the After the JD project. Throughout the conversation, we present key data points from the research on the structure of lawyers’ careers and its complex relationship to agency.
A discussion with Robert Nelson
How do you deploy the theme of structure in The Making of Lawyers’ Careers? How has your thinking on structure in the legal profession evolved as you’ve been involved in this line of research?
We use the term structure in different ways in our work. For one, legal services in the U.S. are primarily organized in a market-based structure. In chapter 2, “From the Golden Age to the Age of Disruption: Setting the Context for Lawyers’ Careers in the New Millennium,” this especially comes to the fore when we talk about the historical evolution of the profession and major changes that come about largely by way of interaction between the state and the market. The state plays a big role in certain arenas like in criminal prosecutions and regulation. Twenty percent of the profession overall is found in the provision of legal services, from government lawyers to state-supported pro bono legal services. The other 80 percent is in the private sector.
The two-hemispheres thesis is another structure. You might think of it as two different market structures of the profession: the portion of the profession that serves individual clients and the government and then the part of the profession that serves business and business clients. The Making of Lawyers’ Careers dives into the entire system by exploring even more minutely how lawyers spend their time for what kinds of clients and then in what fields of practice (see example “Wave 3 (2012) respondents allocation of time for types of clients” and ” “Percentage of earnings attributed to each practice setting, wave 3 (2012)” below).
Legal services organizations are another important structure within the book, and we explored how different organizations mapped onto different geographic and practice areas. At the top of the prestige hierarchy is the large corporate law firm, and then beneath that, there are medium-sized firms, and then smaller firms and solos in very small firms, and so on. The project is organized around 18 different geographic markets. There are four big urban markets: New York, DC, Chicago, and Los Angeles, and then there nine medium-sized markets like Boston, St. Louis, etc., and then far less populous markets like the entire state of Oklahoma, the eastern half of Tennessee, etc. And so we’re able to analyze the profession in terms of these market tiers, which are important structures.
Putting these two structures together, within each of those different geographic areas, you see some of the same actors, but the big law firm tends to be concentrated in the big cities, with some advance into regional markets. Increasingly one of the shifts is that more of the bigger firms have reached out into these other markets and opened branch offices there. Very often they do it by merging with an established local firm, but then it becomes the local office of a large law firm.
An important contribution of the book is how we trace these different structures—like geography and legal organization—and show how they map onto the structure of lawyers’ careers over time. What that helps us see, for instance, is how there’s been a major increase in the size and power and resource control of inside counsel. Now we see that a very common career path is to start in a large law firm for a few years and then to move inside the legal department of a business corporation (see “Sequence Analysis”). Inside counsel departments are made up of well-paying jobs. Corporate counsel, as clients, have a lot of control over law firms. I think law firms still sit atop the status hierarchy of the profession, but the inside counsel very often call the shots with their outside law firms. The new relative status of corporate counsel and big law firms is another important aspect of the structure of the legal profession today.
Sequence analysis: Common pathways from large law firms
In The Making of Lawyers’ Careers, the authors use a technique called sequence analysis, based on DNA sequencing, to understand the structure of lawyers’ careers: What does a career trajectory look like across its multiple stops? How does a top 10 law school lead to a large law firm, then to a federal government job? How common is that path? Individuals often say that their career was a matter of luck, unplanned, or an accident. While there may be some truth in that, by structuring the large amount of individual career data AJD has via sequencing, researchers are able to better understand how certain patterns occur and reoccur, how one position in life might lead to another, and how certain starting positions might make it more difficult or easier to proceed to a certain type of role. This is possible as sequences have a specific order that cannot be changed. The main task of sequence analysis is the comparison of those sequences.
How do they do this? “The empirical process through which we determine the commonalities between sequences is called optimal matching,” the authors explain. “This approach defines the distance between the sequences as the number of operations it takes to transform one sequence into the other.”
Of the 4,183 careers on which the researchers had data, they identified 12 typical careers through which all the individual sequences were grouped (called clusters). Those 12 were then further refined to four groupings—large-firm starters, midsize- or small-firm starters, business starters, and public-interest paths—based on first job post–law school. These were further broken down into clusters within groups, for instance, people who remained in large firms across their lives or those who moved from large firms to business. For example, the large-firm starters group contains three core clusters: those whose careers began and remained in the large firm (19.4 percent of sequences); those who went from large firms to business (9.5 percent of sequences), and those who transitioned from a large firm to a small firm (4.8 percent of sequences). With this context, researchers were then able to draw broader conclusions about the relationships between those in those clusters and things like law school status, gender, ethnicity, and other structures. For instance, the large-firm starters cluster had, not unsurprisingly, an extremely high proportion of graduates from elite law schools (40 percent attended a top 10 or top 20 school). But, they also found that 46 percent in the sequences also came from outside the “elite” schools—a marked change from decades ago when large firms were all but closed to the nonelite schools. The sequences also found that while women and minorities had made progress at large law firms (the cluster is almost half female [48 percent] and about one-third non-white), the “data powerfully reveal that the acceptance of women and minorities within the large-firm setting is bounded and that, despite the fact that they began in a large law firm, women and minorities in the large-firm cluster are less likely than are White men to be in equity partnerships…”
Similar analyses were performed across all of the various typical career clusters.
Why is this type of analysis critical? Doing this work not only offers insight into the common paths that lawyers take but shows how possible mobility is within them. Ronit Dinovitzer, who lead efforts on this technique, notes that the analysis has several important takeaways: the order of events is important (for some, a first job sets them on a particular trajectory; for others, changing sectors is a way to leverage skills or expertise); sequences reveal something about the structure of the legal field and the forms of capital that are valued (including race, gender, ethnicity, and law school attended); and when aggregated across hundreds and thousands of lawyers, the individual choices that are observed in each sequence in fact reflect and reinforce broader patterns in the profession. The conclusion, the authors write, is mixed:
The sequence analysis reveals a story of constrained social mobility that is fully revealed only once careers begin to mature. At the start of lawyers’ careers, we witness in many of the sequences an opening up and reconfiguration of traditional hierarchies: women and minorities are welcomed into large law firms, as are graduates of some less elite law schools. This early mobility supports the efforts of the profession to welcome diversity and embrace the demographic change that it has faced.
Yet, as career trajectories unfold—with individuals and organizations making decisions about promotion (or the chance of promotion) and individuals getting married and forming families—we find the old hierarchies seeping back in and reestablishing much of the original structure.
When we go back to Heinz and Laumann’s original two-hemispheres thesis, we find some interesting structures that have evolved in the legal profession. In the mid-1970s in Chicago, the personal client hemisphere and the business client hemisphere were separate—the lawyers practicing in those hemispheres went to different law schools and had different ethno-religious backgrounds. White Anglo-Saxon Protestants were the dominant group on the business side. All the securities lawyers were WASPs. Divorce lawyers were heavily Jewish. Government lawyers, politically connected lawyers, small-firm litigating lawyers—a lot of them were Irish Catholics. When Heinz and Laumann did their study, the size of the two hemispheres in terms of the amount of time that lawyers worked was about equal.
When they replicated that study in the 1990s, the amount of time spent on business had grown dramatically. Instead of being divided in half, it was one-third personal clients and two-thirds business clients. But the crude ethno-religious segregation had broken down by the mid-1990s. What emerged instead was social hierarchy defined by gender and race. By the mid-1990s, a lot of women had entered the profession, as had a larger number of people of color.
When we carry that analysis forward, tracking the lawyers who passed the bar in the year 2000, we still see a predominance of business interests in terms of the time that lawyers spent versus earnings. We capture this quantitatively in the book. We can see that even though lawyers for business and large law firms make up some 30 percent of lawyers, they have twice that in terms of the share of income. The tilt toward business has not—in terms of lawyers’ time—changed very much from what Heinz and Laumann found in 1995, which surprised us. But they were only looking at one city, and we’re looking at the nation.
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. It’s in that sense that these structures shape the career opportunities of lawyers. But we have to remember that one of the main themes of this book is that 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.
A good example of this is the success story we opened the book with. Constance, who had gone to law school at night while working as a social worker, had made connections in a domestic violence court and was then hired as a prosecutor. This was an upward move in her career. And in one of her cases, she was prosecuting a lawyer who had counseled a client to commit perjury. She brought in an expert on professional ethics to testify about that crime. And that expert was so impressed by her that he hired her for a boutique professional ethics firm. Then that small boutique was merged into a very large law firm, and Constance become a nationally, very well-respected expert on lawyers’ ethics. This story shows how agency can interact with fluidity. She probably would not have been hired at the outset by those big global firms where she works now because she didn’t have the right kind of credentials, but she moved up. And the field of professional ethics has ballooned because there’s a lot more liability for lawyers than there was 20 years ago.
For many years in the legal profession, it was possible to hold one job for the majority of your career. But in the last quarter century, a lot has changed. As you have noted in earlier AJD publications, lawyers who entered the bar in the year 2000 saw a multitude of job switches. Could you talk about the stability of lawyers’ careers over time? Are lawyers’ careers less stable now than prior? How does mobility and stability affect lawyers’ perceptions of their careers and their mental health?
We spend quite a bit of time in chapter 4 looking at where people start and then where they end up. It is still the case that if you’re going to spend your career in a large law firm, the odds are best if you’ve started in a large law firm. But we know quantitatively that people move a lot more than they used to. We compare the number of job changes in our sample to what Heinz and Laumann found in Chicago in both 1975 and 1995. Today there are many more job changes on average.
Mobility
The authors of The Making of Lawyers’ Careers explain that there is not a lot of data on job changes and mobility, though “it is widely assumed that lawyers change jobs far more often than was the case in the golden age of law firms.” AJD data comes from the first 12 years of lawyers’ careers, a time of volatility in young peoples’ careers and especially in lawyers, where the first job, as the authors explain, is often akin to an “apprenticeship.” While Heinz and Laumann found that “lawyers averaged 2.5 jobs” across their careers, AJD data found that “on average, AJD Project lawyers have had between two and three employers by wave 3: 16% have one, 30% have two, 25% have 3, 16% have four, and 13% have five or more, for an average of 2.8 jobs.” As the authors note, AJD found a high rate of job changes in lawyers’ careers compared with older studies, but the statistics showed a lower rate than “what is reported in the popular media.”
But the narratives also show that lawyers just expect to move. In chapter 3, we talk about how getting a job in a large law firm at the beginning of your career is like a credential now. It’s not the place where you’re going to spend your career, but it’s still a credential for other jobs. The expectation is that people are going to move and they keep moving somewhat surprisingly throughout their career. There’s more movement at the beginning when lawyers are at the entry level, and there’s a very active labor market in the large law firms, and then later, there are also moves to inside counsel. It is unlikely that people move the other way. There is still direction to these moves, but overall there’s more mobility than there used to be.
Changes in the rate of mobility are connected to a lot of other changes. Law firms are no longer committed to giving people lifelong careers. There’s this phrase about being pushed off the iceberg and that even equity partners can be deequitized. That is a new phenomenon. That means that institutional loyalty within law firms has changed. Certainly loyalty between law firms and clients has changed. Clients shop around now, and those relationships are more fluid, and then that has implications for law firms. They have to be more fluid.
We can see that solos and small-firm lawyers change jobs more often than other lawyers. The field used to characterize those careers as being chaotic. What we show in the book is that there are different categories of solo and small-firm lawyers, they are very entrepreneurial, they adapt and change to new market conditions, and they seize different opportunities. One could look at it as chaotic, but it’s also just the nature of that market segment.
Even with these career changes, or what you might characterize as instability, the big finding is that lawyers are satisfied with their careers and their career choices, which is very different than we might expect based on reports by the press and some scholars. On the mental health score, lawyers look sort of average. We do find that there is a gender difference. Women are more likely to be depressed than their male colleagues in the legal profession. In general, though, if you look society-wide, women have a higher level of reported depression than men. In terms of job stability and stress, how does that relate to mental health? We see that one of the findings here, and maybe in some related papers, is that the lawyers in the big firms where they’re putting in a huge number of hours do report higher levels of stress and mental health problems, but they also have the resources to get it treated. And so there’s kind of a compensating pattern. They’re under greater stress, but they also make so much money that they can get treatment for it.
One of the big takeaways of the book was that despite much change, many of the core structures of the legal profession have remained the same. What effect do you think recent advances in technology like generative AI will have on the structure of lawyers’ career and the structure of the profession? Is there something qualitatively different about this moment?
There’s one utopian idea that AI can help close the access to justice gap—maybe help develop tools that individuals can use on their own or redress our lack of legal services for the poor and the middle class. But there’s a huge question about how that actually gets positioned. Is it just being used by court systems, or is it actually an element of the market or not? How does that impact lawyers’ careers on the individual level? Every time we’ve seen a technological revolution in the legal profession, it has benefited the big business sector. For instance, take computerized research, which we now take totally for granted. But computerized research was started as a public-interest project by the Ohio State Bar. Then it was taken over by Mead, which then became LexisNexis. In the end, it was captured by large powerful commercial interests and probably generated even greater disparities in terms of representational resources across the two hemispheres.
The answer is we don’t really know, but I don’t think it’s going to change the profession or lawyers’ careers that much. I think it will change work patterns within various legal contexts. Lawyers are definitely using it as a tool, and that will increase. But I predict that it will become absorbed into and harnessed by the same organizational structures that we already have in the legal profession. And so the large law firms and the inside counsel offices are going to get command of and make better use of AI than other segments of the profession.
Robert Nelson is professor of sociology at Northwestern University and MacCrate Research Chair at the American Bar Foundation.
