Andrew McAfee, in a follow-up to The Problem with the Legal Profession, from a year ago: Two recent articles in the New York Times caught my eye. The first, by Lisa Belkin in the January 24 ThursdayStyles section, was titled "Who’s Cuddly Now? Law Firms." This article builds on an earlier one by Alex Williams in the Times chronicling the declining prestige of law as a career. Belkin’s article describes a number of radical (by the profession’s historical standards, anyway) steps taken by many law firms in order to make them better places to work, especially for bright young people. These steps include a move away from the traditional laserlike focus on billable hours as the desideratum for a lawyer who wants to rise within the firm. Some law firms, according to the article, have done away the concept of billable hours altogether.
Have you seen Michael Clayton? In the “Ocean’s” franchise and earlier movies, Clooney played guys who were on top of everything. He’s very intelligent, and it’s easy enough for him to point his chin, glare, and tell people off. But in “Syriana” and now in “Michael Clayton” he has done something more interesting: he’s playing clever guys who lack the killer instinct, who have some strain of personal honor that holds them back from simply winning. People in and outside Michael’s firm keep condescending to him, but he’s forty-five years old and broke, and he’s not a man who can afford to lose his temper, even if he wanted to. He has to deflect other people’s contempt into a strategy of survival. Gilroy has a sardonic, rather than a melodramatic, view of life: Michael will never be an anti-pollution crusader like Julia Roberts’s Erin Brockovich or John Travolta’s lawyer in “A Civil Action.” The fixer is hardly shocked to discover that the world is corrupt; he has just had enough of it.
Signs In the Times: The End of Billable Hours | 
