With this issue’s theme being “Beyond Private Practice,” it would be an oversimplification to focus solely on stories about lawyers going in-house or taking other gigs in the legal economy. For starters, if it is a place that can be moved “beyond,” the borders of “private practice” must first be defined. Is ownership structure a fundamental feature? How about the staffing model? The billable hour? The monopoly for providing legal services according to statute? Or, if we’re mostly talking about moving on from orthodox concepts of the law business, is it not useful to see how orthodoxy has changed over the generations?

A fascinating read (freely available through CLBC’s Remote Access Subscription Database at courthouselibrary.ca) is “The Three Ages of Modern American Lawyering and the Current Crisis in the Legal Profession and Legal Education” (Santa Clara L. Rev. 58 (2018): 453), which examines how lawyers’ identities have evolved throughout three distinct ages, with us now being on the cusp of a fourth age.

Closer to home, a corpus of published commentary continues to explore other facets of these changes — what lawyers experience as “vocational” drift. See Prof. Julie Macfarlane’s The New Lawyer, 2nd ed. (2017). Vocational drift is a catch all term for the sense of displacement many lawyers feel as market forces, technology, generational conflict, and other factors challenge the status quo around what a “private practitioner” is, and who can lay claim to being one. Meanwhile, a book like Remaking Law Firms: Why and How, looks at just how variegated the legal service provider market is becoming... and confronts us with many examples (such as the concept of “outsourced in-house counsel”) that demonstrate how mutable the business of legal practice has become.