Lawyer-Client Decisionmaking in Civil Rights and Poverty Practice: An Empirical Study of Lawyers' Norms
![handle is hein.journals/geojlege9 and id is 1111 raw text is: Lawyer-Client Decisionmaking in Civil Rights
and Poverty Practice: An Empirical Study of
Lawyers' Norms
ANN SOUTHWORTH*
INTRODUCTION
Do lawyers who work on civil rights and poverty matters passively await
marching orders from their clients, or do they use their clients as pawns in
lawyers' campaigns to further causes? These caricatures of lawyer deference and
lawyer domination feature prominently in recent debates about the fate of the
Legal Services Corporation and the roles of lawyers in progressive politics.' My
research on Chicago lawyers suggests that neither of these portraits well
describes lawyers' own understandings of the proper allocation of decisionmak-
ing authority between lawyers and clients. Rather, the lawyers in my study
offered varied and nuanced accounts of their roles in charting strategies, and their
norms differed by the practice settings in which they worked. Their views about
how they should interact with clients appeared to reflect the opportunities and
constraints of their practices as well as the needs and expectations of their clients.
The following quotations come from my interviews with these lawyers. One
legal services lawyer observed:
[I]n many cases, the client is interested in a result and comes to you because
presumably you know the best way, or the way that is most likely to get that
result. That's why the client is coming to you. If the client knew how to obtain
the result without your help, the client wouldn't come to you, the client would
just do it. So, there has to be some reliance on the expertise of the attorney in
establishing and suggesting ways to proceed. I mean, ultimately the decision is
up to the client, but most clients, because they're not attorneys, because they're
* Assistant Professor, Case Western Reserve University School of Law. I am greatly indebted to Jack Heinz
for advising me about methodological issues throughout this project and to Paul Schnorr for helping me prepare
interview questions. I also benefitted from comments during my presentations of earlier drafts of this Article to
Northwestern's law and social sciences group, Stanford's workshop on the legal profession, the Law and
Society panel on lawyers and professional politics, and the joint workshop of Case Western Reserve University,
The University of Akron, and Cleveland State University law schools. Thanks to Mel Durchslag, Jonathan
Entin, Robert Gordon, Jack Heinz, Ronald Kahn, Robert Lawry, Kevin McMunigal, Andy Morriss, Robert
Nelson, Deborah Rhode, Bill Rubenstein, and Rayman Solomon, all of whom commented on excerpts of earlier
drafts. Case Western Reserve University Law School supported the empirical research for this Article. Heidi
Emick cracked all my software puzzles, and Kelly Colasurdo assisted with the research. Above all, I am grateful
to the lawyers who participated in this study.
1. See infra notes 7-10 and accompanying text.
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Lawyer-Client Decisionmaking in Civil Rights and Poverty Practice: An Empirical Study of Lawyers' Norms
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