Competition and the Market for Legal Services

Abstract

Recent scholarship in the sociology of the professions and the legal profession in particular has placed considerable stress on the market in its account of the evolution of professions.' Paradoxically, it may be that these scholars have not taken the metaphor of the market seriously enough. Thus, the market control theorists have been driven by their preconceptions to argue that having lost control of the supply of legal services and in the absence of significant demand creation, the legal profession is now in decline.2 In our view the desire to proclaim the impending demise of the profession as a profession is at best premature and at worst misplaced. This is because we consider that the prediction is based on an inadequate conception of professionalism. This concept, we believe, refers not so much to an ability to control a market as to a complex balance between the public interest, client interest, firm interest, and self interest. From this perspective, professionalism at least as it has come to be understood in the twentieth century can be seen as an undertaking to provide the public with access to competent practitioners imbued with a notion of public service and wedded to certain measures of public protection (including ethical discipline) in return for reasonable rewards in terms of status and remuneration, constraints on competition including a monopoly on the supply of their services, and the right to regulate the profession's affairs (including recruitment, training, and discipline).3 However, this balance of interests has been disrupted in recent years by a Government pursuing a policy of deregulation and the removal of anticompetitive practices and by pressure from the consumer movement. It follows that the debates of this decade over deregulation, advertising,

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