Abstract
This book is a detailed ethnography, via both participant observation and interviews, of temporary lawyers doing document review work. The central argument of the book is that several developments, notably the unbundling of law into discrete components and technological changes, make it possible for both corporate legal departments and law firms to farm out routine law work to contract lawyers, thereby creating a new underclass of lawyers who are paid extremely low wages, do largely low skill tasks and whose professional identity as lawyers is threatened. What is important about the argument is that it breaks a popular conception of lawyers as belonging to an elite, highly paid, high status profession in the labour market.
Through very detailed documentation of information from participant observer experience and interviews with 20 contract lawyers amassed over four years of fieldwork, the author uncovers several findings that support his thesis that at the low end of the industry, ‘deprofessionalization’ is taking place. Members of high status profession lose control of their work and this lack of control over use of expert knowledge results in fundamental questioning about their occupational identity.
Thus, in Chapter 2, the author shows through his interviews that the choice to be a temporary lawyer is an involuntary one, as opposed to arguments made by others that temporary professional jobs will attract a new breed of employees who value flexibility. In Chapter 3, the author describes the nature of document review work, highlighting its very simple and routine nature (coding of documents), the Taylorist nature of management control systems and the volume of ‘deskilled’ work in a typical project attorney contract. Chapters 4 and 5, building on Chapter 3, involve a detailed examination of management control of the work (not very different from control in low skilled manufacturing, or clerical or call centre operations) and various subtle forms of lawyer resistance such as slowdowns and ‘box shopping’ - a practice allowing contract attorneys some control over their work. It involves ‘eyeing the information on the outside of the box or looking at its contents to determine if the documents in the box would be more interesting to review, or easier to code’. These forms of resistance are different from and ‘weaker’ than the resistance offered by unionized employees to Taylorist job control on the manufacturing assembly line.
In Chapter 6 the author gets to grips with the issue of professional identity. Here the author successfully juxtaposes the participants’ identity as lawyers alongside their identity as low skilled temporary clerical workers (‘automatons’, ‘cogs’ in the process). He notes that most of his informants were confronted with a status incongruity and that they developed a variety of strategies to deal with this issue, including asserting their collective skill and intelligence. However, the exploration of identity in this chapter was not as well done as the description of the work in the previous chapters.
Overall, the key strength of the book is in the ethnographic account. The author is able to allow readers to vicariously experience the tedium of document review work and the evidence presented is sufficient to convince any reader that this work is clearly deskilling and deprofessionalizing and that the legal profession, despite its high status, resembles, for this kind of work at least, low end clerical and manufacturing work that is rigidly controlled through very Taylorist work processes. While many aspects of a lawyer’s work (and in fact the work of most professionals) does involve some low skill work, as long as it is part of a larger package, i.e. a secure job in a firm, it does not detract from the professional identity of lawyers. For example much of the work done by first year associates in prestigious firms, who have graduated from elite law schools, includes routine aspects such as document review as well. But when the work is unbundled, and all one does is the routine work under insecure and short term employment conditions, it resembles so many other ‘low status’ occupations.
In Chapter 7 of the volume, the author engages in a general discussion of current developments in the law field, which are suggestive of further unbundling and commoditization of law work. These trends indicate further deprofessionalization and I was not convinced of the author’s use of the term ‘re-professionalization’, not seeing a strong enough argument to support the use of that concept in the volume. It also seemed strange that for a book that was published in 2011 (a full three years after the onset of the financial crisis that has intensified, to a dramatic extent, many of the trends the author notes in his final chapter) there was little or no discussion of the impact of the financial crisis on the legal industry. This is a small point however. The reason why this book is worth reading is for its ethnographic account of document review work by temporary attorneys.