The Legal Profession

With clear and concise explanations of all basic concepts in the law of lawyering and all topics tested on the MPRE, this accessible book allows professors to satisfy the ABA professional responsibility requirement with a course that students find highly engaging and useful. Unlike most professional responsibility textbooks on the market, however, it links ethics issues to portraits of the practice contexts in which they typically arise for real lawyers, helping students appreciate their relevance in contemporary practice. It also introduces students to the rich empirical literature on the profession, teaching them about the profession's overall composition and organization as well as huge variation in the practice settings, types of work, and daily experiences of American lawyers and their clients. It describes powerful economic and cultural forces that are reshaping the legal profession, and it explores current controversies relating to access to justice, globalization, technology, diversity, and legal education. It invites students to reflect on their place in the profession and how they will navigate the turbulent landscape to chart successful, rewarding and responsible careers in almost any type of practice today's law graduates might enter. Most chapters also contain problems that can be used in class discussion or as written exercises. The Second Edition is updated to include problems, materials, and questions drawn from recent events highlighting professional ethics issues currently in the news. It also presents the most recent scholarship and commentary on new challenges for the legal profession posed by technology, litigation finance, and globalization. This is the only PR book on the market that provides sufficient explanation of basic legal concepts and the operation of the legal system to make it suitable for first-year students, but it also works very well for second and third year courses.