Court Opinion

ID: 9481352
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 08:16:26.729549+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:48:15.589682
License: Public Domain

KANNE, Circuit Judge,
concurring.
With this case we are merely observers of a current trend — one of a series of incremental steps away from ethical standards which set lawyers apart from entrepreneurs. As Judge Easterbrook wryly notes, “The ABA has jettisoned, and the states are in the process of replacing, [an ethical] relic of the rules against champerty and barratry.”
I do not see this relic as worthless for I do not believe that the legal profession, or the American public which it serves, is better off when lawyers are first given authority to foment litigation and then are permitted to carry on that litigation at their own cost and risk.
During the past 25 years there has been continuing pressure to convert the lawyer’s “professional calling” into a “commercial enterprise” spurred on by egalitarian motives and an urge for unfettered marketplace economics. The desire to make a fundamental change in the lawyer’s role in American society is not new. Dean Roscoe Pound described the changes urged for lawyers in the Jacksonian era of the mid-1800’s as an effort “to substitute for the profession ... [a] trade pursuing a moneymaking calling in the spirit of a business.” R. Pound, The Lawyer from Antiquity to Modern Times, at XXXVII (1953).
Dean Pound also foresaw the late twentieth century threat to the practice of law from “another era of deprofessionalizing” but he believed that the organized bar would serve as a bulwark against that threat. Id. He knew the danger — but as we see from Judge Easterbrook’s observation noted above — he greatly misjudged the defense. Yet as in the past, I believe that today’s legal “marketing” will pass and “law as a business” will fade as new generations of lawyers strive to retain attributes of service before self-interest which lie at the foundation of a traditional profession.
Because the legal analysis of the majority is correct, I concur.