For Your Summer Reading List

In addition to Steve Lubet's new book, which David McGowan referenced below, you should also take a look at the new AALS PR newsletter, which The Legal Profession blog has posted on its site.  The newsletter highlights recent scholarship and upcoming conferences; it also has a fabulous section written by Hofstra's Roy Simon, which identifies dozens of recent changes to ethics rules in various jurisdictions around the country.  And for something else to add to your summer reading list, have a look at the widely praised book from Michael J. Kelly, entitled Lives of Lawyers Revisited, Transformation and Resilience in the Organizations of Practice.  Here's a summary offered by the author:

Lives of Lawyers Revisited represents a sustained argument that the subject matter of the course in law school variously called legal ethics or professional responsibility or legal profession needs to be expanded to include analysis of the work lives of lawyers. In order to make sense of the work of about a million lawyers, the strategy of the book is to focus on the most important and dynamic development within the legal profession over the last few decades--the organizations of law practice. It first draws the reader into non-fiction stories of five markedly different law practices---illustrating how they function, handle conflict, articulate organizational values and manage their sense of economic realities and necessities. The practice accounts are followed by chapters on the nature of recent change in the legal profession, analytical methods of understanding law practice organizations and finally, the way in which all law practices work within a framework of incommensurate ideas of the meaning of a profession. By placing the spotlight on organizations as settings that deeply affect lawyer behavior and generate their own logic and tensions, Lives of Lawyers Revisited speaks to the experience of most lawyers, as well as the curiosity and expectations of law students. The book surfaces important issues, not typically part of law school curricula, directly relevant to the meaning of "professionalism" in law.