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Studies suggest that women in law appear dissatisfied with the practice of law due to the difficulties of balancing work and family. Little research has examined how the contextual characteristics of law firms affect women lawyers’ sense of life balance and career satisfaction, which is the focus of this study. I propose that if women in law firms can have children and be just as satisfied with their careers and have the same degree of life balance as women without children, then women practicing law can “have it all”. I show how contextual characteristics of law firms are important in understanding mothers’ and non-mothers’ work experiences.

Although law schools have seen rising representation of diverse racial and ethnic groups among students, minorities continue to represent disproportionately small percentages of lawyers within large corporate law firms. Prior research on the nature and causes of minority underrepresentation in such firms has been sparse. In this paper, we use data on a national sample of more than 1,300 law firm offices to examine variation across large U.S. law firms in the representation of African-Americans, Hispanics, and Asian-Americans. Overall, minorities are better represented in offices located in Western states and in major metropolitan areas; offices that are larger and affiliated with larger firms; offices of firms with higher revenues and profits per partner; offices with greater associate–partner leverage; and branch offices rather than principal offices. They are equally distributed between offices with single-tier and two-tier partnerships. Distinct patterns emerge, however, when the three groups are considered separately and when hierarchical rank within firms is taken into account.

Purpose – In this chapter, I examine critically the assumption in the literature that many lawyers decide to leave the practice of law, and especially large law firms, due to lawyer dissatisfaction. I take a macro focus on employee flows and networks at large law firms, particularly at the elite level.Methodology/approach – I use a large archival data set of alumni data, internal memos, and newsletters from the 1930s through the 1990s from four large New York City corporate law firms. I perform statistical analysis of 2800 cases. I also include qualitative analysis of the newsletters and firm records of comings and goings. I analyze lawyer migration as a mobility project of lawyers in conjunction with Domhoff#x02019;s class-domination theory to explain the interconnectedness of the corporate community, policy networks, governmental positions, the federal judiciary, and high-powered private lawyers.Findings – I explore the various ways that lawyer migration benefits the original firm by creating or strengthening relationships with other large law firms, corporate clients, and governmental organizations. It is clear that most lawyer departures are not meant to signal negative outcomes. Elite lawyers in large firms make both corporate and political connections through their migration, connections that have important repercussions not only for the lawyers but from their original firms.Originality/value of chapter – A fundamental question for sociological analyses of elite professions, and a more practical concern in the field of legal studies, is why do so many lawyers decide to leave the practice of law? The focus of these accounts, both journalistic and academic, is on the fact that lawyers leave – and, in particular, that they leave the practice of law entirely. The explanatory variable, in many cases, is some variation on individual lawyer dissatisfaction. Instead, I show that most lawyer departures are not meant to signal negative outcomes. Lawyer migration benefits the original firm by creating or strengthening relationships with other large law firms, corporate clients, and governmental organizations.

This paper explores organizational restructuring in corporate law firms. We review recent changes in law firms’ business models and structures, specifically as they relate to the externalization of work – or the unbundling of work and its placement with outside entities, which redefines the division of labor and the nature of the employment relationship. We draw from the extensive scholarship on the legal profession to raise empirical and theoretical implications of market-driven change to the careers of lawyers as well as the shifting patterns of stratification within corporate firms and the profession at large.

This chapter provides an insight into the career paths of autistic professionals in large private practice law firms. Rather than being a result of efforts to recruit autistic people for the first time through targeted hiring programmes, it is suggested that corporate law firms recognized these strengths early in their formation and developed a type of employment both well suited to autistic strengths and able to make accommodations. Six career stages from Law Student to Retired Partner are described with their opportunities and challenges to illustrate the career paths of autistic professionals who work in law. A call is made for an approach to inclusiveness of the autism community by employers and professional associations to create a system of employment system that supports the employment of many while meeting the unique needs of individuals.

Networks connecting two important supporting institutions – law firms and venture capital partnerships – explain regions’ disparate abilities to sustain diverse high-technology ventures. In order to explain the diversity of entrepreneurial activity in a region, we distinguish between institutional capacity (the number of law firms and venture capitalists in a locale), strong interinstitutional connections that span legal and financial domains, and cohesive structural communities of directly and indirectly connected supporting organizations. We argue that strong connections and cohesive communities are essential, but little examined contributors to the development of diverse research-based economies. We find support for the argument in an empirical analysis of initial public offerings (IPOs) by U.S. high-technology companies in five industries between 1993 and 2005. Linking regional outcomes to strong ties that span local legal and financial institutions and to cohesive structures that weld them into communities offers new insights for research on the institutional and network underpinnings of entrepreneurship and regional economic development.

Building on relational inequality theory, this paper incorporates social capital as a device to trace the flow of resources through relationships originating within and beyond organizations. I draw on a survey of over 1,700 lawyers to evaluate key dynamics of social capital that shape earnings: bridging and bonding, reciprocity exchanges and sponsorship, and boundary maintenance. The findings show social capital lends a lift to law graduates through bridges to professional careers and sponsorship following job entry. Racial minorities, however, suffer a shortfall of personal networks to facilitate job searches, and once having secured jobs, minorities experience social closure practices by clients and colleagues that disadvantage them in their professional work. A sizeable earnings gap remains between racial minority and white lawyers after controlling for human and social capitals, social closure practices, and organizational context. This earnings gap is particularly large among racial minorities with more years of experience and those working in large law firms. The findings demonstrate the importance of identifying the interrelations that connect social network and organizational context to impact social inequality.

Job satisfaction along with a work–life balance of attorneys in law firms has become an important issue to the legal industry. This paper examines the relationship between strategic positioning of law firms and the job satisfaction of their associates.

Using 1,108 firm year observations of US law firms from 2007 to 2016, this paper examines how a firm's strategic positioning affects the job satisfaction of its associates. The strategic positioning is measured with two financial ratios derived from modified DuPont analysis: revenue per lawyer (RPL) and leverage (LEV). To compare the level of associates' job satisfaction depending on law firms' RPL and LEV, this paper uses t-tests. In addition, this paper adopts OLS regression and simultaneous equations to examine the relation between law firms' strategic positioning and their associates' job satisfaction.

This paper shows that associates in the law firms with a high LEV strategy have lower job satisfaction because these firms provide a more demanding work environment than in the firms with a high RPL strategy.

This paper first documents empirical evidence that a firm's strategic positioning significantly influences job satisfaction of its employees, using data on the legal industry which is human-capital-intensive and is considered one of the sectors that provide the most notorious work environments.

Using Porter’s (1980) generic strategy to define strategic positioning of law firms, this paper aims to explain why some law firms have more/less pay inequality than others do and examine the impact of pay inequality on law firms’ partners and the job satisfaction of their associates.

This paper uses data from The American Lawyer. The strategic positioning, compensation and job satisfaction scores of 614 firm-year observations of US law firms are hand-collected over the period from 2007 to 2016.

Non-equity partners at law firms with differentiation strategy (Porter, 1980) are more likely to build rainmaking ability than those at law firms relying on billable hours. As a result, law firms with differentiation strategy have a narrower pay gap between their equity and non-equity partners than those firms relying on billable hours. After controlling for the effects of strategy on pay inequality using two-stage and three-stage least squares models, this paper finds that a wider pay gap deprives associates of job satisfaction.

Considering strategic positioning, this paper validates why some law firms have more/less pay inequality and proves how pay inequality affects job satisfaction.