From partners to team leaders: tracking changes in the Canadian legal profession

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article presents an effort to transcend the law vs business dichotomy that usually tends to prevail in discussions on the future of the legal profession, by identifying the various logics to which lawyers are exposed. It uses a computer-assisted analysis of trade magazines from 1985 to 2015 to document the changes that have taken place in lawyers’ perceptions of their work and their role in society over the last thirty years. The results show that, although a professional logic can be found in Canadian lawyers’ discourse, Canadian lawyers are exposed to a variety of logics that provide them with new vocabularies and frames of reference. The decreasing importance of the “professional” discourse suggests that significant changes may be about to take place in the field, as actors develop new strategies to legitimize alternative practices and work configurations.