| The American legal profession has witnessed numerous and far-reaching changes over the past thirty years. It has more than tripled in size. The corporate sector now dominates the profession and large firms are getting larger. Lawyers in both the individual hemisphere and the corporate hemisphere are becoming increasingly specialized. And, lawyers in both sectors are adopting mainstream commercial business and marketing practices. In this context, many scholars of the legal profession have questioned whether the bar is one profession or many, and whether there can be cohesion in such a divided and competitive community. Yet, we know that lawyers, and other professionals, have always faced oppositional pressures. On the one hand, they are members of a professional community with collective goals. On the other hand, they are competitors in a marketplace, vying for the same finite business.; Through a study of social networks in the plaintiff's personal injury bar, I consider the issues of professional cohesion and market competition. This research examines the content and structure of their advice networks (colleague ties) and their referral networks (market ties). This study finds that personal injury lawyers are highly embedded in social networks that both sustain them in their practice and contribute to professional cohesion. These networks simultaneously enhance the market for personal injury cases and support the collective goals of the profession. Further, a decoupling of their advice networks (cooperative) and their referral networks (competitive) allows these professionals to cooperate with each other at the same time that they compete with each other for cases. Yet, these social networks do not resolve all of the tension between their collective goals and their individual goals. Cohesion in the plaintiff's personal injury bar is moderated by the stratification in the profession, and by their market competition. |
