The Making of Lawyers' Careers

"How do hierarchies of race, class, gender, and law school status condition the career trajectories of lawyers? And how do individual lawyers strategically navigate the constraints and opportunities of their environments? Where do they find professional satisfaction? This book offers an unprecedented account of opportunity structures and social stratification within the early 21st century American legal profession, combining unique longitudinal survey data with interviews, storytelling, and insights from social theory. Starting in 2000, the authors collected over 10,000 survey responses from more than 5,000 lawyers, following these lawyers through the first twenty years of their careers. They also conducted in-depth interviews with more than 200 lawyers. They contextualize their findings through attention to the features of a market-driven legal profession, in particular the growth in recent decades of the private sector relative to the public sector and corresponding disparities in earnings and status between these different segments. The analysis in this book reveals a legal profession that is highly stratified. Although individual lawyers exercise agency and often find satisfaction in their work, there are deep divisions within the profession by client type and practice setting, and women and attorneys of color face discrimination and persistent barriers to advancement. The careers of lawyers both reflect and reproduce inequalities in law and society writ large"--