As counsel for Pennzoil's successful effort to recover billions of dollars in damages from Texaco over the acquisition of Getty Oil Company, the Baker & Botts law firm of Houston, Texas, achieved wide public recognition in the 1980s. But among its peers in the legal and corporate worlds, Baker & Botts has for more than a century held a preeminent position, handling the legal affairs of such blue-chip clients as the Southern Pacific Railroad, Houston Lighting & Power Company, Rice University, Texas Commerce Bank, and Tenneco. In this study, Kenneth J. Lipartito and Joseph A. Pratt chronicle the history of Baker & Botts, placing particular emphasis on the firm's role in Houston's economic development.
Founded in 1840, Baker & Botts literally grew up with Houston. The authors chart its evolution from a nineteenth-century regional firm that represented eastern-based corporations moving into Texas to a twentieth-century national firm with clients throughout the world. They honestly discuss the criticisms that Baker & Botts has faced as an advocate of big business. But they also identify the important impact that corporate law firms of this type have on business reorganization and government regulation. As the authors demonstrate in this case study, law firms throughout the twentieth century have helped to shape public policy in these critical areas.
Always prominent in the community, and with prominent connections (former Secretary of State James A. Baker III is the great-grandson of the original Baker), the Baker & Botts law firm belongs in any history of the development of Houston and the Southwest.
The past two decades have seen profound changes in the legal profession. Lives of Lawyers Revisited extends Michael Kelly’s work in the original Lives of Lawyers, offering unique insights into the nature of these changes, examined through stories of five extraordinarily varied law practices. By placing the spotlight on organizations as phenomena that generate their own logic and tensions, Lives of Lawyers Revisited speaks to the experience of many lawyers and anticipates important issues on the professional horizon.
"Michael Kelly has done it again! His Lives of Lawyers Revisited is a very easy read about some very difficult notions like 'litigation blindness' and law as a business. It presents some fascinating perspectives on our profession."
—J. Michael McWilliams, Past President, American Bar Association
"The best single book about the American realities and possibilities of the American legal profession, combining an empathic and insightful account of law practice with a penetrating analysis of the wider context of professional work."
—Marc Galanter, University of Wisconsin
"Michael Kelly believes that professional values and conduct are not realized in codes, but in the experiences of practice, and that practice draws its routines and ideals from organizations. Through his studies of lawyers in various firms, closely observed and sympathetically described, Kelly reveals how differently organizations adapt to the intense pressures of today's practice environment. His method of linking individual life-experiences to organizational strategies and the external constraints of competition and client demands infuses realism and richness into the concept of professionalism and makes this one of the most interesting and original books on professions and professionalism to appear in years."
—Robert W. Gordon, Yale Law School
"In his two volumes of Lives of Lawyers, Michael Kelly explores legal ethics in an unusual, and unusually rewarding, way. Rather than focusing on rules or arguments, Kelly looks at the kind of lives lawyers lead. Ethics, Socrates thought, is about how to live one's life, and Kelly takes the Socratic question to heart. He explores the institutions lawyers work in and the choices they make. He writes with intelligence, great insight, and above all with heart. This is a superb book."
—David Luban, Georgetown University
Michael J. Kelly is President and Chairman of the Board of the National Senior Citizens Law Center, an advocacy group for older Americans of limited means.
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