This period marked the transition of lawyers from pure courtroom advocates to business advisors, with a corresponding focus on professionalism and speed of service. It is no coincidence that the rise of larger law firms coincided with the turn of the century and the ensuing boom period of US commerce, wherein names like Rockefeller, Carnegie and Vanderbilt emerged as pioneers and monopolists. ![]() The term ‘BigLaw’ itself was coined by professional advisory firm Beaton Capital in 2013 to refer to large law firms that used this pyramid structure. The number had grown to more than 1,000 by 1924, and the intervening years had seen the establishment of the so-called ‘Cravath System’ that defined the broad organisational structure that many law firms sport to this day.Īs laid out in Marc Galanter and Thomas Palay’s seminal book Tournament of Lawyers (1999), the Cravath System refers to a loosely pyramid-shaped hierarchy of advancement where partners are served by several partnership-track associates below them to ensure profit maximisation. These grew larger by the decade, with 15 firms recognised in the US with four or more lawyers in 1872 and 210 in 1903. The first entities that would come to be recognised as ‘law firms’ emerged in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and generally comprised three or fewer lawyers. The founding of Harvard Law School’s training program in 1817 providing a mould that would come to define legal education in the US, at the same time paving the way for the formation of so-called ‘ white shoe’ firms in the northeastern US and the rise in professionalism that ensued. Legal education in America’s early post-colonial history was rarely formal, with most lawyers entering the sector by apprenticing to established legal professionals. ![]() In this feature, we take a deep dive into the concept of BigLaw as a phenomenon in the legal sector, studying its characteristics and how its influence has come to define the professional landscape of the modern era.
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