In the same way that the Imperial Justice Laws changed the circumstances in which individuals had to make decisions about entering the private legal profession, structuring their careers, and leading their lives, lawyers in the newly created lawyers' chambers faced corporate decisions about how to structure professional life. The lawyers' chamber, a juridical person under public law, with its seat in the city in which the court of appeal lay, was the principal organ for the new self-government. The provisions of the Lawyers' Statute (RAO) provided lawyers laconic guidance and a bare framework for self-government, leaving it to their own initiative how to flesh out the direction and governance of their professional and even their private lives.

The ways that lawyers in the province of Hannover invented and administered rules for self-government and self-discipline between 1879 and 1933 reinforce the picture of a hierarchical profession, whose elite governed and expected deference to their governance and used the institutional structures of Honoratiorenpolitik to perpetuate their power and corporate conceptions of honor. By the twentieth century, and especially by the 1920s and early 1930s, inchoate conflicts among groups of lawyers began to be reflected in contests for influence within and control of professional institutions. As dissent and dissatisfaction emerged into the open, the legitimacy of those professional institutions and of their control by lawyer-notables at the higher courts fell into question.