front cover of Baker & Botts in the Development of Modern Houston
Baker & Botts in the Development of Modern Houston
By Kenneth J. Lipartito and Joseph A. Pratt
University of Texas Press, 1991

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.

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BigLaw
Money and Meaning in the Modern Law Firm
Mitt Regan and Lisa H. Rohrer
University of Chicago Press, 2021
The Great Recession intensified large law firms’ emphasis on financial performance, leading to claims that lawyers in these firms were now guided by business rather than professional values.  Based on interviews with more than 250 partners in large firms, Mitt Regan and Lisa H. Rohrer suggest that the reality is much more complex. It is true that large firm hiring, promotion, compensation, and termination policies are more influenced by business considerations than ever before and that firms actively recruit profitable partners from other firms to replace those they regard as unproductive. At the same time, law firm partners continue to seek the non-financial rewards of being members of a distinct profession and are sensitive to whether their firms are committed to providing them. Regan and Rohrer argue that modern firms responding effectively to business demands while credibly affirming the importance of non-financial professional values can create strong cultures that enhance their ability to weather the storms of the modern legal market.
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Legal Records at Risk
A Strategy for Safeguarding our Legal Heritage
Clare Cowling
University of London Press, 2019
Why do so few institutions in the legal sector have professional records managers or archivists on their staff? This book is the culmination of a three year project by experienced archivist and records managers on private sector legal records at risk in England at Wales. It summarises the work of the Legal Records at Risk (LRAR) project and its predecessors, diagnoses the problems of preservation of archives in the legal sector in England and Wales and outlines a national strategy for such records.
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Lives of Lawyers
Journeys in the Organizations of Practice
Michael Kelly
University of Michigan Press, 1994
America has long enjoyed a love/hate relationship with its attorneys; jokes equating lawyers with vermin abound at the same time that our love of litigation is reflected in a doubling of the ranks of lawyers since the 1960s. Though we often see the lawyer as a crusading lone wolf of justice, the illuminating Lives of Lawyers demonstrates that the integrity of individual lawyers is fundamentally influenced by the nature of the legal organizations that have come to dominate the field. In fleshing out these agencies of legal expertise, Kelly offers important insights into the personal ideals of lawyers, the struggle to clarify professionalism as interpreted by the legal origination, and the effects of these factors on society's perceptions of law and lawyering.
Lives of Lawyers paints an intimate portrait of five legal entities: two corporate firms, an in-house corporate counsel's office, and a public interest agency. Each is viewed through a kaleidoscope of client/colleague relationships, connections to civic and community life, income levels and career satisfaction of attorneys, the social status of the organization, and the character of the particular law practiced. These detailed portrayals vividly reveal the diversity inherent to the profession and the wealth of responses to the question of what shapes the values of today's legal practices. The author's deft use of narrative and debt to the discipline of biography and sociology make his five stores a first-rate read.
Kelly gets into the trenches with lawyers comprising these organizations; they don't mince words in passing judgment on themselves, their employers, or the state of the profession--particularly its growing commercialism. Nonetheless, Lives of Lawyers reminds us of the constantly renewed dedication by lawyers to the principles of legal professionalism.
Michael J. Kelly is University Vice President and Professor of Law, Georgetown University.
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Lives of Lawyers Revisited
Transformation and Resilience in the Organizations of Practice
Michael J. Kelly
University of Michigan Press, 2009

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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front cover of Tournament of Lawyers
Tournament of Lawyers
The Transformation of the Big Law Firm
Marc Galanter and Thomas Palay
University of Chicago Press, 1991
Tournament of Lawyers traces in detail the rise of one hundred of the nation's top firms in order to diagnose the health of the business of American law. Galanter and Palay demonstrate that much of the large firm's organizational success stems from its ability to blend the talents of experienced partners with those of energetic junior lawyers driven by a powerful incentive—the race to win "the promotion-to-partner tournament." This calmly reasoned study reveals, however, that the very causes of the spiraling growth of the large law firm may lead to its undoing.

"Galanter and Palay pose questions and offer some answers which are certain to change the way big firm practice is regarded. To describe their work as challenging is something of an understatement: they at times delight, stimulate, frustrate and even depress the reader, but they never disappoint. Tournament of Lawyers is essential to the understanding of the business of the big law firms."—Jean and Colin Fergus, New York Law Journal
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