The Underlying Causes of Withdrawal and Expulsion of Partners from Law Firms

The law governing the withdrawal and expulsion of partners from law firms is undergoing rapid change as demonstrated in the papers presented in this symposium. ' Under the older, traditional conception of lawyer affiliation, withdrawal or expulsion was unthinkable: Once a lawyer became a partner it was assumed that he - in the old days it was almost always "he" - stayed with the firm until death or retirement. The firm cleaved to the lawyer over the same course, or so we were led to believe. In the good old days, decisions about membership in partnerships involved organizations that were actually partnerships and participants who were actually partners. The decision about partnership was thus crucial in a professional lifetime, a decision of perhaps the same solemnity as marriage and indeed possibly more solemn. The traditional conception was largely myth, transforming an ideal into an assumption about reality. Be that as it may, in today's world we accept marital divorce on demand, recognizing that basic social forces have required the law to permit no-fault divorce, and we similarly accept that corporate takeovers and dissolutions are inevitable. Social forces similar to those that have radically changed family life and corporate life have also changed life in law firms. Thus, in considering the evolution of the law governing law firm withdrawal and expulsion, it may be beneficial to consider the underlying social forces that drive the law to respond. What follows is a sketch of those forces rather than a detailed inventory. First, these external social forces manifest themselves in changes in the character of law practice itself. Among these social forces are the manifold changes in the work performed by law firms. The following litany of changes is familiar: the specialization and hyper-specialization in lawyer functions; the increasingly rapid rate of obsolescence in legal knowledge acquired in law school as compared to relevant legal knowledge needed at later stages in a professional career; the increasing competition in law practice; the transformation of law from a local vocation practiced in the county courthouse and law offices on the town square into a national and increasingly globalized vocation; and the need to assemble large teams on short notice to deal with heavy transactions or heavy litigation. The cumulative effects of these changed conditions on law firms are similar to the cumulative effects of modern social pressures on marriage, on the family, on neighborhoods, and on business organizations. That is, the vectors of social force are strongly centrifugal. Second, and relatedly, are changes occurring in the structure of legal service organizations. In this context, I am using the term "legal service organization" advisedly. A law firm is an organization created to perform professional services. As such, it must adapt its structural form to perform the specific work it undertakes. What constituted effective organization a century ago is not necessarily effective organization today. This change is partly due to the fact that much law practice today, although not most, is carried out in settings that are not law firms. I refer here to the law departments of corporations and of nonprofit institutions such as hospitals and universities; to prosecutorial and defender offices; to civil law departments of local, state, and federal governments; and, last and unfortunately least, to offices providing legal services for the poor. Third, law practice within independent law firms has radically changed. Law practice in towns and smaller cities remains much as it was a half century ago, but that is not where most visible change is occurring. This change is occurring on the now familiar grounds of the large law firms. There are now more than a dozen or so law firms of five hundred lawyers or more, firms of one hundred lawyers exist all over the country, and firms of no fewer than fifty lawyers exist in virtually all cities with a population greater than 250,000. …