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The Traffic in Legal Services: Lawyer-Seeking Behavior and the Channeling of Clients

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 July 2024

Jack Ladinsky
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Abstract

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This paper discusses the major factors that appear to influence how clients and lawyers come together, and what role professional advertising might play in this process. The context for the discussion is the traditional model of appropriate lawyer-client relations, which is an ideal built into the code of professional conduct. The model presumes a lawyer's professional reputation, and the maintenance of professional standards by the bar. In the real world, conditions of legal practice and problem defining by consumers cause departure from the ideal. A number of factors influence how clients come to perceive problems as amenable to legal assistance. These are certain psychological, cultural, and social attributes whose operation in law is less well understood than it is in medicine. In addition, there are certain structural factors that influence the link between prospective clients and lawyers. Prominent among these is the fact that legal services comprise an imperfect market due to uncertainty of case outcome and difficulties of information procurement. It is suggested that consumers are reasonably rational in their search for lawyers given these problems. Consumers rely heavily upon informal contact networks and influential intermediaries, a process not unlike searching for a job or a doctor. The implications of these findings for opening up information channels through relaxation of the ban on advertising are discussed.

Type
Research Article
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 11 , Issue 2: Delivery of Legal Services , Fall 1976 , pp. 207 - 223
Copyright
Copyright © 1977 by the Law and Society Association.

Footnotes

The work reported here was supported by funds granted to the Institute for Research on Poverty of the University of Wisconsin, Madison, by the Office of Economic Opportunity pursuant to the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964. The author is indebted to Richard Abel, Glen Cain, Richard Lempert, and Leon Mayhew for helpful comments. The opinions expressed are the sole responsibility of the author.

References

1. The conditions of law practice in relation to ethical behavior are illustrated in Carlin (1966), and Handler (1967).

2. There is an interesting question as to whether people in some social milieus are socialized at an early age into particular views about how to manipulate the legal system. For example, Claude Brown (1971), in his autobiography, suggests that he and his peers “managed” the juvenile court in a way that was at once childish and sophisticated.

3. For an example in welfare rights, see Reich (1964).

4. For a comparable development in relations between automobile manufacturers and dealers, see Macaulay (1966).

5. Time spent with a client would be a misleading indicator in law, since lawyers more than doctors are likely to do the bulk of their work in the client's absence. Lawyers typically bill on the basis of total time spent rather than by the number of visits. Thus, if the quality of outcome and hourly rate are held constant, the better lawyer from the client's perspective would be the one who spent less time on the case.

6. I am indebted to Leon Mayhew for making available these statistics from the Detroit Area Study; see Mayhew and Reiss (1969).