Professions, Developments in Legal

Institutional and Demographic or Evolutionary Change

One change axis is institutional and demographic or evolutionary influence. Institutional change would be those alterations formally adopted, frequently abetted, if not forced in fact, by sources of power outside the profession. The unification of the French legal profession by statute, where avocats and conseil juridiques now constitute a new French bar is an example. Another is the frontal assault by the United Kingdom government on legal aid with the institutionalization of budget caps, centralization, salaried lawyers, conditional fee arrangements, new income thresholds, and preference for forms of alternative dispute resolution. Structural reform does not always prevail. The opposition of established lawyers and conservative law [Page 1192]professors, the latter for the most part trained in Germany, have beaten back two attempts in Korea to reform university legal education and training.

Change by demography or evolution means that some alterations in the makeup of factors that constitute the profession, such as in the labor force, are so large that the result is structural change, frequently even more consequential than those produced by state intervention are. In this respect, the entry of women into legal professions is the most dramatic and important change in the past 20 years. The ramifications of this demographic shift have yet to play out in full. One important consequence in those countries where large commercial law firms are common, such as the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and the Netherlands, has been the creation of a work force of highly educated and talented women. Though frequently not given the opportunity to compete on equal terms with men, women constitute the backbone of labor at subpartnership levels in that practice setting.

Another example of significant evolutionary change is the growth of private (nonstate) legal education in Mexico. Private law schools have overcome the ascendancy of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), the traditional training ground of the political and bureaucratic elite. These private schools are new in origin, oriented toward the commercial sector, producing personnel for the elite business law firms and now considered to have among their ranks the top five law schools in the country.

Exogenous and Endogenous Change

A second axis of change is that between developments that originate in the environment around law practice and those that are indigenous to it. There are many interactions between the social, economic, and cultural context and the legal professions. In the United Kingdom, to illustrate, the constriction and reorientation of the welfare state has led to increasing costs to secure a legal education. The government has preferred to channel limited resources to the National Health Service and to primary and secondary education. At the same time, Britain's increasing multiculturalism has led to new importance accorded to representativeness in various dimensions of the profession.

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