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    Cheaper by the Hour: Temporary Lawyers and the Deprofessionalization of the Law
    Cheaper by the Hour: Temporary Lawyers and the Deprofessionalization of the Law
    Cheaper by the Hour: Temporary Lawyers and the Deprofessionalization of the Law
    Ebook220 pages5 hours

    Cheaper by the Hour: Temporary Lawyers and the Deprofessionalization of the Law

    By Robert A. Brooks

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    About this ebook

    Recent law school graduates often work as temporary attorneys, but law firm layoffs and downsizing have strengthened the temporary attorney industry. Cheaper by the Hour is the first book-length account of these workers.

    Drawing from participant observation and interviews, Robert A. Brooks provides a richly detailed ethnographic account of freelance attorneys in Washington, DC. He places their document review work in the larger context of the deprofessionalization of skilled labor and considers how professionals relegated to temporary jobs feel diminished, degraded, or demeaned by work that is often tedious, repetitive, and well beneath their abilities.

    Brooks documents how firms break a lawyer's work into discrete components that require less skill to realize maximum profits. Moreover, he argues that information technology and efficiency demands are further stratifying the profession and creating a new underclass of lawyers who do low-end commodity work.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTemple University Press
    Release dateMar 4, 2011
    ISBN9781439902875
    Cheaper by the Hour: Temporary Lawyers and the Deprofessionalization of the Law
    Author

    Robert A. Brooks

    Robert A. Brooks is Professor of Criminal Justice at Worcester State University. He is the author of Cheaper by the Hour: Temporary Attorneys and the Deprofessionalization of the Law and coauthor of Confronting School Bullying: Kids, Culture, and the Making of a Social Problem. Jeffrey W. Cohen is Associate Professor of Criminal Justice at the University of Washington Tacoma and coauthor of Confronting School Bullying: Kids, Culture, and the Making of a Social Problem.

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    • 4/5
      If you want to read a largely value-neutral account of the degradation of labor, here it is! Many people in this ethnographic narrative, including the author, repeatedly make the point that the lawyers doing mind-numbing work, often in terrible conditions, are getting paid in the area of $30 or more an hour, which makes it better than doing mind-numbing work in terrible conditions for $5 an hour, but I can’t help thinking that this framing represents an appalling narrowing of possibility both for moral evaluation and for policy response. Also, it’s very clear that as employers can drive down the wages, they will, so that $30 is not exactly stable—in fact the last chapter briefly discusses outsourcing to India, though the author only interviewed contract lawyers working in America. “[U]ntil the day when document review is fully automated, or until all of it is sent to India, the work of the project attorney—the leading edge of the new underclass—will continue.” Good times!

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