Vol. 9 No. 4 (April 1999) pp. 177-179.
FRANCHISE LAW FIRMS AND THE TRANSFORMATION OF PERSONAL LEGAL SERVICES by Jerry Van Hoy. Westport, Conn.: Quorum Books, 1997. 156 pp. Cloth $59.95. ISBN 1-56720-135-0.
Reviewed by Craig McEwen, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Bowdoin College. Email: cmcewen@bowdoin.edu.
What happens to lawyer work and professionalism under market pressures that help to produce "franchise law firms"? That is the central question underlying Jerry Van Hoy’s compact and readable description and analysis of the organization and work of two national firms that sell "pre-packaged legal services." This book provides an important window on routinized and standardized law practice, and provokes questions that go far beyond franchise firms to the nature and implications of legal professionalism.
According to Van Hoy, "Franchise law firms have become the high-volume, streamlined, and efficient operations envisioned for legal clinics. Legal clinics (and prepaid legal service plans) helped to revolutionize the sale of personal legal services by popularizing flat fees. However, franchise law firms have developed efficient production and marketing systems that allow branch offices to profitably serve a high volume of clients on a flat fee basis" (19). What marks a "franchise firm" thus is that it produces through sophisticated computer software a limited menu of prepackaged legal services. Clients are screened by secretaries so that typically those needing more complex services or ones that the firm does not offer never see a lawyer. The attorney’s task with a client is to complete the appropriate check-off sheet that would permit choice and production of the suitable legal forms for the circumstance. Then the job of the lawyer is to "sell" the "product" for a fixed fee to the customer (client).
The data for the analysis of these firms come largely from interviews with 68 lawyers and 18 secretaries at two offices of one firm and one of the other. For purposes of comparison, Van Hoy also interviewed a random sample of 35 personal services lawyers in the Chicago area. The interviews followed the semi-structured format employed by Jerome Carlin in his study of Lawyers on Their Own (1994). The data also include observations of 80 consultations of clients with lawyers. Unfortunately, Van Hoy was unable to interview clients.
In Chapter 1, Van Hoy describes his market perspective, draws from his own and Carlin’s earlier study to describe the work of "personal services attorneys" and then describes and differentiates legal aid, legal clinics and ‘franchise’ law firms and their development. Chapter 2 sets out the organizational model for franchise law firms which make use of centralized mass market advertising, detailed operations manuals, and carefully developed computer systems that generate standard legal documents. Salaried secretaries are central to these operations and may be paid at the same level as staff attorneys, many of whom are recent law school graduates. Managing attorneys in the two different firms have somewhat different incentive structures but are responsible for assuring the profitability of local offices.
In Chapter 3 Van Hoy employs his observations of office visits to argue that client services center on salesmanship not legal problem-solving. Clients are presumably drawn in by television advertising directed at the large population of middle and working class people who have never used an attorney before. Secretaries screening potential clients to insure that their legal needs could be met by the limited menu of services. Brief consultations (15-20 minutes for divorce intake) are structured and constrained by the standardized worksheets that lawyers complete. Van Hoy concludes that "successful attorneys convince clients to buy their services by offering a specific course of action" rather than a menu of choices (63). Indeed, according to Van Hoy, the clients are often "relatively unsophisticated consumers of legal services [who] demand that attorneys make all decisions" (74). At the same time, successful marketing requires the illusion of individual service, both for the lawyers who find satisfaction in helping people solve problems (68) and for the clients who "expect their legal documents to be ‘uniquely crafted’ by trained professionals"(75). If that illusion can be maintained, then clients are likely to come away relatively satisfied according to Van Hoy (130).
Chapter 4 compares the world of small firm lawyers with that of franchise attorneys. On the one hand, Van Hoy finds striking parallels in the kinds of routine personal services cases that provide the core of their practices. Neither the franchise nor solo/small firm lawyers spend much time doing legal research or appearing in court for their clients. Rather, the major task of each is to process documents that at least begin in boiler-plate. On the other hand, Van Hoy sees differences in the organization of the work, relationships with clients, and the sense of personal satisfaction in work. While small firms are collegial in organization, the franchise firm is highly bureaucratized. While traditional personal services lawyers claim that they build personal relationships with clients, franchise attorneys move clients through quickly, not to build trust and relationships, but to sell products. While independent general practice lawyers generally express satisfaction with their work, franchise lawyers "complain that their work is very routine, and boring" (85). Van Hoy concludes that the crucial reason for this latter finding is the routinization of production that reduces lawyer autonomy.
Chapters 5 and 6 pursue in greater detail what is the central issue for Van Hoy — to explain the alienation that many franchise lawyers experience. Low salaries, difficult to achieve bonuses, routinized and limited relationships with clients, and the absence of autonomy in decision making alienate staff attorneys, some of whom are attracted to unions as a way to respond to their plight as disposable parts in a mass production scheme. Managing lawyers are somewhat less alienated, in part because they are better able to imagine themselves as autonomous professionals as a result of incentive schemes that offer less supervision by district managers or ownership equity in the firm. Secretaries seem to fare best both in their relative level of pay, discretion in decision-making (screening clients), and job satisfaction.
In the concluding chapter, Van Hoy argues that the "professional dominance" model that has emerged in the study of professions must be rethought in the light of increasing competition in labor and client markets. It is the difficulty that many law school graduates find in getting work and the large untapped mass market for low-cost and limited legal services that helps better "to explain the experiences of lawyers and secretaries at franchise law firms" (130). Thus, he concludes that "markets may be more important determinants of degradation or autonomy at work than firm size or bureaucracy alone" (137-8).
Van Hoy sets out on a limited task which he accomplishes quite successfully in this brief ethnography of two franchise law firms. He wants to describe and explain what lawyers and secretaries in these firms do, the organizational context for their work, and how they experience both the work and the firms. The value of this book will be lost, however, unless others pick up the story where he leaves off. That means thinking once again and more deeply about the collisions between the professional model and ideology for organizing work and the challenge of delivering legal services to large segments of the population who simply cannot pay the price that traditional notions of "professionalism" demand.
Throughout the book Van Hoy views the work of the franchise firm lawyers through the lens of the professional ideology that highlights lawyer autonomy and idealizes individualized service of clients. In doing so he reflects to a large extent the views of the attorneys that he is studying who themselves have been socialized into an ideology of professionalism. The experience of these lawyers and the language of the analysis conveys a powerful message: that the work of these lawyers is somehow inferior. It is deskilled, routine, degraded, pre-packaged. It is sold and marketed to customers rather than tailored to the particular needs of individual clients.
What if we try to step outside the ideology of professionalism that this book takes for granted, however? In doing so, we might ask about the extent to which we come to understand certain kinds of work in terms of status distinctions that are also price distinctions. Thus, custom-made kitchen cabinets, individually tailored suits, private liberal arts college educations, and individualized legal consultation are of higher status and far more costly than factory-made cabinets, off-the-rack clothing, large university schooling, and pre-packaged legal services. What are the marginal differences in quality of the products or services, however? Indeed, how much of the "sale" of professional services is in fact about individualization and personal attention rather than about the substance that is delivered? Is the individualization in fact the "product"?
The professions with their monopolies over certain kinds of practices both require that men and women trained and licensed as lawyers become the salespeople who market pre-packaged legal services in franchise firms and help create the very expectations that make for the alienation that Van Hoy describes. How, if at all, can a profession deliver quality legal assistance at affordable prices? This is an old question, but one that this account of prepackage legal services raises starkly for us again. It is such larger questions then that make the findings of this book provocative. Van Hoy leads us to them without taking them on himself.
References
Carlin, Jerome. 1994. Lawyers on Their Own: The Solo Practitioner in
an Urban Setting.
Copyright 1995