Faculty of Education, Social Sciences and Law

This paper engages with William Twining’s longstanding concern with lawas a
‘practical art’ through a discussion of the changes which the corporate law sector is currently
undergoing. These changes will be examined through an analysis of qualitative data on the
recruitment practices of large commercial law firms and a reading of the trade press. The
evidence of these firms’ thoroughgoing commercialisation, and of Human Resource (HR)
strategies designed to produce legal entrepreneurs, is suggestive of a Foucaultian ‘analytics of
government’. The data indicates however that underlying the dramatic changes in
professionalism, there are also significant continuities. As a result a range of competing
rationalities and discourses are today in circulation in the corporate law firm – for instance,
discourses of diversity/meritocracy/social mobility; entrepreneurialism; economic rationality
and managerialism. These various discourses both support and reflect the complex of
‘modernising’ impulses, residual cultural practices and acts of resistance which today
characterises the legal professional field. A primary attraction of contemporary recruitment
practices is their capacity to encompass and manage these contradictions.

... Key components of commercialised professionalism are competency-based recruitment and selection processes and Diversity Management ... produce the behaviours required to deliver strategic and cultural change through the assessing ... Recruitment, selection and assessment”. ...

... Similarly, the primary conceptual weapons in this reconfiguration of legal professionalism are as malleable19 and essentially ideological as those that supported professional power (De Cock & Hipkin, 1997; Doherty, 1997, p. 243). ...

... Toddington, in his discussion of the 'quality phenomenon' in the academic world, exposes thecontradictions within these stated aims: "once (managerialism) has colonised an area of genuinely non-commercial activity and infused its organisa-tional structures with commercial ...

ABSTRACT This paper draws on a series of research studies of the last two decades of legal aid reforms to consider their wider social and political meaning. They are evaluated against a ‘master ideal’ of access to justice rather than a fictive golden age. It will be argued that despite New Labour's rhetoric of social inclusion and the positive initiatives this sometimes produced, the neo-liberal character of the reforms has eroded both social rights and access to justice. Their internal logic requires the imposition of a market and the use of least cost labour, thereby reducing the guarantee of due process to the lowest common denominator: consumption of a legal service becomes a sufficient alternative to just outcomes.

... Solicitors' Regulation Authority, http://www.sra.org.uk/code-of-conduct.page). ... and Diversity Policy (Equality and Diversity Policy Guidance 2007, Legal Services Commission ... discriminate against those who differ from the traditional normative professional [Thornton's “benchmark ...

ABSTRACT This article examines a particular instance of the relationship between gender, training provision and the labour market, namely the provision of training for women solicitors wishing to return to the labour market after a career break. The specific empirical material, which is gathered from a sample of women solicitors, both returners and non-returners, in West and North Yorkshire, is explored in the context of demand-side and supply-side explanations of women's position in the labour market. However, we also argue for a perspective which takes account of the culture of the profession and which undermines the assumption of economic rationality underpinning many labour market studies. Similarly, our exploration of the potential of training for easing labour-market re-entry is evaluated within the context of the gendered ethos of the solicitor's profession, as is the discussion of the curriculum design issues in professional women returners' training which arise out of the research.

2 Abstract: The last two decades have seen a rapid transformation of the professional structures relating to the provision of publicly funded (legal aid) legal advice and support in the U.K. Market control theorists have seen this process as a symptom of the withdrawal of State shelter for exclusive practice rights , while other commentators have seen the process as a 'renegotiation of professionalism' whereby lawyers have been drawn into a new relationship with stakeholders. The wider context for these developments has been the growth of New Public Management, and the contractualisation of relationships between public service providers and 'consumers'. This process took a new direction with the development of the Community Legal Service, and the extension of support by the Legal Services Commission to advice agencies in the Not For Profit (NFP) sector, as part of a programme of legal aid reform. This reform, it has been argued, has been characterised by the residual...