Chicago Lawyers, Revised Edition: The Social Structure of the Bar

The legal profession is stratified primarily by the character of the clients served, not by the type of legal service rendered, as John P. Heinz and Edward O. Laumann convincingly demonstrate. In their classic study of the Chicago bar, the authors draw on interviews with nearly 800 lawyers to show that the profession is divided into two distinct hemispheres–corporate and individual–and that this dichotomy is reflected in the distribution of prestige among lawyers.