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This paper explores early careers by drawing on nationally representative surveys of lawyers’ early careers in Canada and the United States. It will examine the sorting of lawyers in sectors and settings as well as the mechanisms that are key to understanding this process. Prior research has pointed to the importance of law school credentials, race, gender and social class, which continue to be important lines of demarcation. The comparative lens provides the opportunity to better understand the ways in which these factors are contingent on national context, which, in turn, shapes the symbolic and cultural value of the forms of capital that can provide access to more prestigious, powerful and remunerative positions in the legal profession. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the complex and subtle world of lawyer–client relationships. Taking corporate lawyers as our case study, we provide an examination of the strategies and tactics that lawyers use in dealing with their clients. Rather than adopting the binary distinction between professionalism and commercialism on which much past research has been based, we here take a more pragmatic approach. Informed by recent work on relational regulation by Silbey, we embrace a broader framework that incorporates lawyers' relations, organizational contexts and professional proscriptions. Based on analyses of interviews with 106 corporate lawyers working in large law firms, we demonstrate that there is a heterogeneous set of practices that characterizes corporate lawyers' relationships with clients. We observe four ideal types that run along two axes: the extent to which lawyers reference law versus experience to explain their behavior or decisions; and the extent to which lawyers frame their role in terms of individual action or as part of a collectivity. We argue that identifying ideal types allows us to open up the scope of understanding the ways in which lawyers interact with their clients. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

While the legal profession was traditionally conceived of as geographically bounded, recent decades have witnessed a surge in the movement of lawyers across geographic boundaries. This mobility has transformed the paths through which legal careers are built and sustained. Relying on Bourdieu's concept of capital, this paper focuses on the effects of geographic mobility within the legal profession in order to explore how moving can alter the forms and value of capital - human, social, or symbolic - necessary for professional advancement. Drawing on two unique datasets, we find that geographic mobility can be a source for the emergence of new inequalities within the profession, so that lawyers moving from one jurisdiction to another do not receive full value for their credentials. We also find that geographic mobility can exacerbate existing inequalities in the profession, and finally, our analyses suggest that understanding the effects of capital assets equally requires attention to the functional form of capital within professional fields. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Addresses the role of victim cooperation in the prosecution of domestic violence cases in a specialized court in Toronto, Canada. Research on victim cooperation and the prosecution process; Identification of the demographic or situational factors associated with a victim's decision to cooperate; Examination of the correlates of victim cooperation during the prosecution process.