The firm as a new actor in legal education: implications for lawyers' identity formation

James Faulconbridge and Andrew Cook (Lancaster University) presented insights from empirical research into the way lawyers’ identities are formed by regulated education and also increasingly by law firms.

James and Andrew’s slides are embedded below, and you can also download their full paper at the bottom of the page (PDF file, 40 pages, 175 KB), co-authored by Daniel Muzio (University of Leeds). The paper was blogged on Zeugma by Paul Maharg.

The role of the law degree in relation to the production of lawyers has long been debated, and ongoing regulatory change, such as the Solicitors Regulation Authority’s recent work-based learning pilot, constantly raises new questions about the sites of professional knowledge and identity formation. In this context, we examine work on the sociology of the professions and the insights this provides into the supposed role of regulated, formal education in the production of lawyers. Specifically we consider the role of regulated training in producing lawyers’ identities and influencing their understanding of their roles and responsibilities. We then consider the implications of the colonisation of spaces of regulated legal education by large law firms in terms of the effects on the production of lawyers and their identities. We also consider how non-regulated firm based training shapes lawyers’ identities outside of the realms of the regulated domains of legal education.

We base our analysis on research conducted as part of an ESRC funded project examining professional education in global law firms and the role of this education in shaping the identities of lawyers. The project explored the nature of legal education and training through nearly 100 interviews with providers of the Graduate Diploma in Law (GDL) and the Legal Practice Course (LPC), junior lawyers and training personnel in large law firms. The data revealed how the large law firm is increasingly emerging as a key site in which lawyers’ identities are produced, as a result of developments such as the tailored LPC and corporate techniques such as selective recruitment, induction, mentoring and corporate training, designed to shape, from an early stage, how new recruits come to understand their role and duties as a professional practitioner.

We aim to further enhance understanding of the role of the firm in the production, socialisation and regulation of lawyers and the implications this has for the way we theorise professions and their work. We argue that the firm is now as an important an actor as universities and the Law Society in regulating lawyers’ understandings of their role and responsibilities due to the multitude of ways that firms influence the training experience of new recruits to the legal profession. This is important as the large employing organisation has often been a missing actor from studies of legal education and from the broader field of the sociology of the professions.

Bernardette Griffin (College of Law) reports:
James and Andrew, both researchers in the Department of Geography at Lancaster University, added a different dimension to legal education research.

Findings from their project, based on 80 interviews with law firm recruiters, trainee solicitors, LPC providers and regulators, indicated that law firms’ influence on certain programmes, notably the GDL and LPC, meant that their requirements, skills sets and the expected behaviour of a lawyer with individual firms are known in advance of the training contract period.

Key findings:

• emphasis on client facing and socialisation skills
• students develop confidence.
• students know what matters to the client for the firm
• students network in advance with lawyers from the firm
• this may develop a culture of creating the same kind of individual as a lawyer within a firm

Are firms influencing the GDL and LPC to create or ‘clone’ lawyers of a similar identity? Client and commercialisation skills are required by all practices and firms are not creating an organisation of clones – they simply need certain skills sets.

James and Andrew enquired whether law firms entering the education arena might have implications for the undergraduate degree and its look in the future. This was not favoured by participants seeing the law degree as separate from the vocational stage and the professions.

About the presenters

James Faulconbridge is a geographer by training, but has completed extensive empirical studies of forms of education and learning in global law firms with funding received from, amongst others, the Economic and Social Research Council and the Socio-Legal Studies Association.

Andrew Cook was research associate for the project from which this paper emerges. He has spent twelve months analysing the way junior lawyers develop their identities as lawyers through various forms of training.

Daniel Muzio has a law degree but works in a business school. His research focuses on the reorganisation of professional work and on the management of professional services firms.

Last Modified: 9 July 2010