Marcos Antonio Mendoza

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In my final post on the subject of “respectability” of lawyers (the first four can be found here, here, here and here), I’d like to tie my thoughts together, discussing what the various parties can do to make Bird and Orozco’s thesis of assimilation of lawyers into corporate business teams the “new normal”.  This should give lawyers more career opportunities in the future, slow the loss of influence of the legal profession in businesses, and make legal education a more attractive choice.  Much of the discussion in academia has ignored the in-house counsel approach as being a viable option for the woes of the legal industry.  Below the fold, this post will discuss the roles that academia, in-house counsel, and business firms each may play in increasing the potential for success of a new model for business lawyers.

In my last post, I asked whether business leaders had unknowingly provided the legal industry with a long-term solution to declining interest in the legal profession (based on the drop in applications to law school) and potential waning influence.  I suggested that business leaders (inadvertently or otherwise) may be the driving force that ends up saving the legal profession.  I would like to take the discussion one step further.

There is no doubt in my mind that, historically, companies rarely did much legal training for the lawyers they hired.  They simply bought talent—usually by offering employment to attorneys with private practice experience that was valuable to the corporation.  Sometimes this worked extremely well, and sometimes it failed miserably.  Why? Business leaders sometimes possess only basic knowledge of what quality legal talent really looks like (after all, they usually are not lawyers themselves).  Moreover, they often have difficulty finding a lawyer who can operate in a corporate environment and have high-level legal skills.  The “a lawyer is a lawyer” mentality still prevails. 

Adding to the difficult situation is that private firm attorneys often view corporate attorneys as those who could not flourish in private practice (for whatever reason—lack of skill, drive…

I sincerely appreciate the opportunity to post!  I have been following this blog for some time with great interest.  I hope to bring a third perspective—not as an academic, nor a private firm practitioner, but as an employee of a company who happens to be a lawyer. 

A few weeks back, Professor Heminway posted, and I commented, on the difficulty good law students have in finding jobs.  I made the point that the law is in a state of transition—firms are becoming smaller, but more opportunities are arising within corporate models.  Over the past 20 or so years, attorneys have gradually become more integrated in the corporate world, and we have seen the number of positions with firms gradually decline in comparison.  

As part of this mainstreaming of lawyers into the business model, lawyers are becoming more and more part of business teams, not walled-off in legal departments.*  By incorporating lawyers into operational divisions, have businesses “humanized” lawyers, making them more accepted and respected?  Will this growing engagement and familiarity, with lawyers as co-workers in the business environment, lead to greater opportunities for all lawyers, including those in private practice?  The answer is, maybe, possibly.  It’s complicated.  Allow me to…