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New Strategies for Getting Clients: Urban and Suburban Lawyers' Views

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 April 2024

Carroll Seron
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Abstract

A survey of a random sample of attorneys in the New York Regional Metropolitan Area reveals that they have a lukewarm attitude toward newer, more businesslike client-getting strategies—advertising, prepaid legal plans, nonprofit plans, and closed legal plans; respondents also strongly agree that these techniques have a negative impact on the public's image of the profession. Do structural factors of the profession explain attitudes toward professional practices? To find out, I examined the effect of three dimensions of the profession: organization of work, geographical location of organization, and demographic factors. The findings show both persistent intraprofessional tensions around the impact of these new practices on the image of the profession and tension between older and younger attorneys over advertising and development of legal plans. Also these analyses document a structural dimension of the legal profession not identified in earlier research: suburban practitioners are much more skeptical about the newer client-getting practices than are their urban colleagues.

Type
Change and Adaptation of Lawyers' Work: Evolving Theories
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 27 , Issue 2 , 1993 , pp. 399 - 419
Copyright
Copyright © 1993 by The Law and Society Association

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Footnotes

It is a pleasure to thank Eliot Freidson, Marie Provine, Susan Silbey, and the anonymous reviewers for Law & Society Review for their careful and extremely helpful comments on earlier drafts. I also thank Jean Kovath for her preparation and analysis of the data and Daniel Poor for his research assistance. The research reported here was supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation, SES-89-10544, which I gratefully acknowledge.

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