The Betrayed Profession: Lawyering at the End of the Twentieth Century

"A much needed antidote, with its perceptive comments on the decline of the legal profession."--Warren E. Burger, Chief Justice of the United States, 1969-1986

This is the first searching examination of the troubled legal profession to be written by one of the nation's leading lawyers, and in it Sol Linowitz offers guidelines to a renewed professionalism among attorneys. The Betrayed Profession criticizes not the mouthpieces and the ambulance chasers that are the usual targets of public criticism, but the leaders of the bar--the New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Washington, D.C., firms that have created a "legal services industry" and turned a public calling into an increasingly narrowed business. Linowitz shows that many lawyers have lost their connection to the tradition that theirs is a public profession--that the lawyer's responsibility is not simply to the client, or to the highest fee obtainable, but to the court. Today, the bar association has become a trade union for lawyers, and the public is the loser. This book is an urgent call to action that neither the legal profession nor the public it is meant to serve can afford to ignore.