Betting the System and Beating the House? Gillian Tett’s Story of the Financial Crisis: "Fool’s Gold—How Unrestrained Greed Corrupted a Dream, Shattered Global Markets and Unleashed a Catastrophe"

Review essay of Gillian Tett's 2009 anthropological study of the history and causes of the present financial crisis.

The Vultures Fly East: The Creation and Globalisation of the Distressed Debt Market

ADAPTING LEGAL CULTURES, D. Nelken, ed., pp 257-278, Oxford: Hart, 2001

Corporate insolvency and bankruptcy have given rise to new markets, including global ones, in which lawyers have been key players. This paper examines the role of lawyers in informal restructuring through an analysis of the London Approach and the rise of the distressed debt market.

Rating, Dating, and the Informal Regulation and the Formal Ordering of Financial Transactions: Securitizations and Credit Rating Agencies

Privatising Development: Transnational Law, Infrastructure and Human Rights, M. Likosky, ed., pp 147-171, Martinus Nijhoff, 2005

With the growth of globalization, the role of the state has diminished and more of its legal activities are being taken over by other institutions. This chapter examines the role of law firms and credit rating agencies in securitizations.

Ambiguous Allegiances in the Lawyer-Client Relationship: The Case of Bankers and Lawyers

(Revised May 2009) The relationship between law firms and banks has a long history. Bankers and lawyers constantly work together on transactions so that their relationships are deep and enduring. Through the use of ethnography and interviews this paper examines this relationship and that of the lawyer and client. Because of the unusually tight relationship between bankers and lawyers, the lawyer-client relationship needs to be reconstituted. It is not possible to perceive it as merely a dyadic relationship; it is now multi-polar. Even though clients may be sophisticated repeat players, clients are caught up in a relationship where they will always be secondary to the primary relationship of banker and lawyer.

Keywords: lawyer-client, banks, lawyers, transactions

Lawyers, Law Firms and the Stabilization of Transnational Business

with F. Sosa in Northwestern Journal of International Law and Business vol 28, pp 489-525, 2008

Globalization is having profound effects on the practice and the organization of law. In the field of cross-border transactions the role of the state and its legal system has diminished such that private ordering through contracting is now the key mode of lawmaking. The vast majority of private ordering is undertaken by large law firms with international practices. Moreover, these law firms tend to adopt Anglo-American common law principles when putting together transactions. Yet within Europe there is competition from the law firms of the civil law countries, which are becoming adept at identifying markets not fully taken over by the American and English firms. But in order to understand the roles of lawyers in such cross-border transactions, we start from Abel and Lewis' question: what is that lawyers do? By using a number of case studies of transactions and disputes, we attempt to theorize how it is that lawyers create enabling and support structures for transnational business. We draw on Luhmann's ideas of stabilization of expectations and Gilson's depiction of lawyers as transaction cost engineers to help explain our findings.

Lawyers As Sanctifiers: The Role Of Elite Law Firms In International Business Transactions

Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies vol 14, 2007

International large law firms are vital to the globalization of business transactions. Their role is generally ignored however. This paper analyzes their role using a theoretical gloss derived from Luhmann and the Jesuits. Various examples of transactional work are presented to illustrate the sanctification role.

Straight There No Detours: Direct Access to Barristers (Report 2008)

Co-authored with Avis Whyte: report for the Bar Council

With the inception of the Legal Services Act 2007 following the Clementi Report on new ways of providing legal services in the UK, the Bar is moving to alter the way it practices. Traditionally, the Bar has been a referral profession relying on solicitors and other professionals to instruct barristers when legal opinions or advocacy is sought. In recent years the Bar has attempted to open the barristers' profession to more direct access from clients thus bypassing solicitors.

This has had a mixed reaction among barristers and barristers' clerks. Some see it as the route to a modern diverse profession while others see it as potentially harming these traditional relationships between barrister and solicitor that have been built up over many years. Among solicitors this has been met by their own moves to become advocates in the higher courts.

The report presents findings from research carried out among barristers, clerks, chambers chief executives, and users. Data were collected via interview, survey, and documentary sources. It shows that barristers represent value for money for clients because of lower overheads than solicitors. But the current rules in place that regulate how barristers carry out direct access work do more to hinder than encourage users.

The report concludes that since the Legal Services Act will permit "alternative business structures" which will directly compete with barristers, and solicitors, an expansion of direct access work is one way of countering the effects of these changes.

Will There Be Fallout from Clementi? The Global Repercussions for the Legal Profession after the UK Legal Services Act 2007

Miami-Florida European Union Center Jean Monnet/Robert Schuman Paper Series, Vol. 8, No. 6

The paper presents the historical arguments that led to the Clementi review of the legal profession and its culmination in the Legal Services Act 2007. There were two strands: one based on consumerism (too many complaints about lawyers' services); the other based on a sustained investigation by the competition authorities into professions' restrictive practices (anti-competitive unless proved in the public interest). These led to the abandonment of traditional forms of organization for lawyers' practices (alternative business structures) and the imposition of a new regulatory structure for the profession (oversight and frontline regulators).

In the second part of the paper I examine the trends in lawyers' practices as currently pursued and as envisaged by the Act as aligned with our conceptions of professionalism. Using two hypotheticals: Tesco Law, and Goldman Sachs Skadden, I chart a move from professionalism to deskilling and proletarianization in the legal profession, not unlike that which existed in the 19th century.

This dystopian view, which is essentially a top down conception of the legal industry, is contrasted with a more optimistic view based on the changes in the idealization of careers and life as represented by Generation Y. This is augmented by the changing nature of work, ie, post-Fordist, within organizations which in a number of ways escapes control and measurement because the distinctions between production and consumption, work and leisure allied with distributed network forms of production blur the boundaries that we have taken for granted. In contrast to the socio-economic approaches, I argue that we must examine conceptions of career, inclusion and exclusion, vocation, and community in order to understand how the professions will adapt to the postmodern condition.

Resurgent Professionalism? Partnership and Professionalism in Global Law Firms

published in REDIRECTIONS IN THE STUDY OF EXPERT LABOUR, S. Ackroyd, G.D. Muzio, J.F. Chanlet, eds., Palgrave, 2008

The industrialization of legal practice is leading to an increased tension between professionalism and business as varieties of the prevailing ethos in large law firms. Using historical and biographical data of law firms this tension is examined with the result that professionalism is, on the legal profession's own terms, dying out. Only in rare niche, smaller firms can residues of professionalism be located.

What's Wrong with Legal Aid? Lessons from Outside the UK

Co-authored with A Whyte and published in Civil Justice Quarterly, Vol. 25, pp. 80-98, 2006

The UK spends more per capita on legal aid than any other country in the world, yet appears to reap little benefit from the expenditure in terms of reduction of criminality or disputes. Much of the drive towards spending seems to derive from lawyer generated demand. The paper examines possible ways of improving results and reducing expenditures by looking at examples from other countries.

The Cultures of Globalization: Professional Restructuring for the International Market

PROFESSIONAL COMPETITION AND PROFESSIONAL POWER: LAWYERS, ACCOUNTANTS AND THE SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF MARKETS, pp. 139-169, Y. Dezalay & D. Sugarman, eds., Routledge 1995

An analysis of how large law firms became part of the globalization process at the end of the 20th century. The paper looks at how globalization and culture influence each other and how professional services are treated. It examines what law firms do in globalization and how the rise of the MDP was initially perceived as a challenge to the hegemony of the law firm. The paper has an enduring interest as the UK Clementi review of legal services revives many of the hopes and fears present at that time.

Socio-Legal Ethnography

published in THEORY AND METHOD IN SOCIO-LEGAL RESEARCH, R. Banakar & M. Travers, eds., Hart Publishing, 2005

The paper argues that in order to interpret meaningfully the complexity and contingency of law and society, then ethnography is the prime method that is able to achieve this.

Normative Bricolage: Informal Rule Making by Accountants and Lawyers in Mega Insolvencies

Co-authored with E Skordaki and published in GLOBAL LAW WITHOUT A STATE, G. Teubner, ed., pp. 109-131, Dartmouth: Aldershot, 1997

The Maxwell bankruptcy was the first big international insolvency, one that moved into primary proceedings simultaneously in London and New York. This set up a battle between British administration and US Chapter 11. The intervention by certain individuals who had thought about the consequences of such bankruptcies, including lawyers and judges, enabled a private system of law to emerge to handle these incommensurable systems.