The Betrayed Profession: Lawyering at the End of the Twentieth Century.
by By Mayer, Martin and Linowitz, Sol M.
Category: Philosophy , General

Attacks on lawyers have been common in recent years - pundits and politicians from Rush Limbaugh to Dan Quayle have all had their say about lawyers, and virtually all the critics have stressed the same supposed vices of the profession that have been cause for complaint since Shakespeare's day and even earlier. But The Betrayed Profession, by Sol M. Linowitz, senior partner of Coudert Brothers and former general counsel and chairman of the board of Xerox, written with Martin Mayer, bestselling author of the classic The Lawyers, is a dissection of the faltering ethics of today's lawyers that comes from within the profession's own top ranks, and one that strikes at the heart of what has gone wrong with lawyers and lawyering within the past fifty years. It is the first searching examination of the decline of the 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 ambulance chasers who are the usual targets, but the leaders of the bar - the great 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 unprincipled business.Linowitz shows that most lawyers have lost their connection to the tradition that their 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.The Betrayed Profession offers specific recommendations to restore the practice of law to the respected position it once occupied in American life. Law schools must improve their teaching of ethics. To redress the inequity of the limited legal services available to the poor, Linowitz proposes requiring lawyers to devote at least a week a year to pro bono work or pay a dedicated tax on their fee income. He urges, as well, the construction of a formal code of ethics based both on the specifics of the specialty a lawyer practices and the obligations of citizenship. The Betrayed Profession is an urgent call to action that neither the legal profession nor the public it is meant to serve can afford to ignore.