Legal General Knowledge

These developments in law and economics, external studies and standard jurisprudence represent a process that spans the entire course of the twentieth century, partially eliminating the distinction between internal and external research, and between jurisprudence and teaching. This process has important implications for the dominant conception of legal knowledge, which can be illustrated by examining a fourth aspect of contemporary research, namely socio-legal studies. The dividing line between lawyers and paralegals varies from country to country, as the nature of legal tasks varies within different legal systems and the way in which these tasks are assigned to specific professions. In many countries, the exact line is not clear. In some countries, the term that best corresponds to the term “lawyer” is generally applied to a profession that carries out a very limited range of activities, while other professions require extensive formal legal training and perform work that elsewhere falls exclusively within the competence of the legal profession. The decision to group these professions under the label of lawyers or paralegals requires an arbitrary limitation. An example is the legal profession of notary, as it exists in many civil law countries (Malavet 1996). Historically, the profession of notary was born to create a neutral person who could be trusted to draft fair contracts to be executed by one or more people who could neither read nor write; Today, notaries continue to play a role in the drafting and execution of contracts, applying specific legal knowledge related to these activities. While the notary`s duties are not limited to ministerial functions such as supervising the execution of contracts, it is arbitrary whether the notary should belong to the legal profession or be classified as a paralegal. Law firm librarianship will remain a dynamic and resilient profession as long as it effectively addresses two defining qualities of law firm practice: the monetization of time and the contextualized complexity of legal knowledge. The size and geographic scope of a law firm affects the operation of its library (or libraries).

Information work in an international law firm5 is influenced by the way legal knowledge is produced and shared in such a coordinated firm. At the same time, however, a corporate library`s collection research and development practices are strongly influenced by the staffing needs of its local office. These developments can be illustrated by some of the main themes of modern studies of social law. A notable social science approach to judicial decision-making in the early post-war period was legal recruitment studies, which treated court decisions as a pure reflection of the judge`s ideology, uninfluenced by legal doctrine (Schubert 1959, Ulmer 1960). Although such work continues to be produced, often by the same authors, recent social science studies of judicial decisions tend to emphasize the interplay between ideology and doctrine (Perry 1991, Shapiro 1981), a process that allows lawyers to use their findings and extend them to legal fields (Feeley and Rubin 1999, Kennedy 1997, Tamanaha 1997). A second characteristic aspect of the early post-war period highlighted the discontinuity between the law in force and the law in action. Modern studies of social law often characterize this question in terms of the process of implementation, which involves an analysis of the interaction between legal or regulatory language and the realities of administrative application (Bardach and Kagan 1982, Coglianese 1997). Again, such an approach leads more easily to jurisprudential implications than the previous one, since it replaces an inevitable abyss between written and practiced law with a dynamic exchange in which practice suggests a revision of the legal structure (Ayres and Braithwaite 1992, Kagan 2000).

In addition to the problems of distinguishing between lawyers and paralegals, it is difficult to draw a line between paralegals and “non-lawyer” professions. For example, many non-legal professions require the use of very specific legal knowledge, which is usually applied very regularly. Examples include drafting contracts for routine real estate transactions (typically by U.S. real estate sellers), drafting routine loan agreements (by bank officials), settling tort claims (by non-legal insurance company agents), or advising on probate or tax matters (by financial advisors and accountants). In a sense, all of these professions could be called paralegals; For some professions, paralegal work is only part of their job (e.g., real estate agent), while for others (e.g., insurance agents), the vast majority of their work is. Another challenge to the idea of partnership as a vocation for simple business companies is how the legal press on the internet and independent media such as blogs have opened up the way companies work to constant scrutiny and criticism. “These new media emphatically presented the law as a business and the legal profession as a competitive career in which players largely responded to the financial incentives of the market” (Galanter and Roberts, 2008).