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Lasalle Street and Main Street: The Role of Context in Structuring Law Practice

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 July 2024

Donald D. Landon
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Abstract

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Others have identified client differences as the primary structuring factor in the legal profession. Because of highly differentiated client groups, it is argued, the bar has become fragmented into a multiplicity of professions. Such a conclusion is based on research limited to metropolitan settings. Data from practitioners in rural Missouri and in a middle-sized Missouri city show that community context has a prior structuring influence. Community context appears to affect the probability of entrepreneurial practice, the variations in meaning associated with such practice, client mix and subsequent lawyer self-understanding, work characteristics, and extent of involvement in civic affairs. Further evidence suggests that the legal profession is indeed an “overdetermined social system” with roots that are set deeply in the primary economic and social structures of the setting in which it practices. The bar mirrors in its practice the issues typical of that setting and reflects in its social structure the degree of complexity found in the community. Community context appears therefore to be an additional force fragmenting the legal profession.

Type
Research Article
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 22 , Issue 2 , 1988 , pp. 213 - 236
Copyright
Copyright © 1988 by The Law and Society Association

Footnotes

This paper was originally presented at the Annual Meeting of the Law and Society Association, Washington, D.C., June 11–14, 1987. It has profited from suggestions by Charles Cappell. Robert Kidder and anonymous reviewers of the Law & Society Review provided valuable criticisms of the initial draft. The original research was supported by a grant from the American Bar Foundation, where the author served as a Visiting Scholar in 1982–83.

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