The Gazette 1982

GAZETTE

JULY/AUGUS T 1982

for example, they study so little of processes by which disputes are settled by lawyers and so much about court judgments, they msut get a skewed view of both lawyering and reality. When they are so little exposed to the decisional processes of the lawyer with the client, they fail to see the client as a person but at most as the name of which an appellate case is classified for legal research. When as little attention is given by the academic community to the thousands of units — law offices — producing legal services, the embryonic lawyers get an incomplete view of the process by which justice is pursued. It grieves me to say that it is possible to advance in academe by keeping a respectable distance from the law office. In fact, sometimes it seems that the further away one gets, the greater is one's opportunity for advancement. This fourth arm of government deserves far more attention than the present atmosphere permits. There is current hope. The client is beginning to find a place in law school education and in the concepts of jurisprudence. We cannot understand the administration of justice and leave out the law office. I would put it the other way around. We understand the administration of justice only when we start with the law office and keep it constantly before us.D (Louis M. Brown, who has written extensively on preventive law, practices law in Los A ngeles and teaches at the Unversity of Southern California Law School.) Volume 2 12 Issues ILRM — Now in second year of publication — Bound volume 1, 1981 available soon — back issues of 1981 still obtainable Facts: The annual subscription to Irish Law Reports Monthly: £85.00 (+ 18% VAT = £15.30), includes Index, Table of Cases, Table of Statutes and Noter Upper. Enquiries and cheques to be sent to: The Round Hall Press Ltd., at Irish Academic Press Kill Lane, Blackrock, Co. Dublin. Held ILRM is a precedent in Irish Law Reporting and an asset to every practitioner. The Round Hall Press Ltd., Kill Lane, Blackrock, Co. Dublin. Telephone 850922 1982 IRISH LAW REPORTS MONTHLY

Of course, this is not a full account of our thinkers in jurisprudence. I can find some lawyering in jurisprudential ideas of Eugen Ehrlich, H.L.A. Hart, Hans Kelsen, Jerome Frank, Lon Fuller, and Karl Llewellyn, but often ideas and concepts about lawyering were slid in sideways. Almost nowhere is there a regard for nonadversarial lawyering. I have made meager attempts, often with the help of others. An early article with Walter Probert (19 University of Florida Law Review 447 (Winter, 1966-67)), another with Thomas Shaffer (17 American Journal of Juris- prudence 125 (1972)), and more recently Edward Dauer (a section of The Lawyer's Handbook (American Bar Association, 1975) and Planning by Lawyers: Materials on a Nonadversarial Legal Process (Foundation Press, 1978)), and some other pieces of my own are among the efforts. But these efforts are nowhere near the possibilities and needs of the project. This might be enough to make the point, but I cannot resist the temptation and desire to go further and to express some views as to the needs for develop- ment of the thesis. Concerning legal health and its maintenance, we know little. Somehow we should be curious not only about the legal needs of people but also about the actual uses by people of the law office. How often and for what purposes do clients and potential clients now seek assistance of the law office? We know so little, in short, of the legal health of our population and the role of the law office in that enterprise. Structuring the methodology for that inquiry is no easy task. At a minimum it will need at some point the co-operation of the lawyers who operate law offices, for the law office is the repository of great amounts of information of the contact of the public with law. We could use that information, if we had it, to analyze the methods we now have to deliver legal services. We might find ways to help maintain legal health by periodic legal checkups, and ways to improve the profitability and responsibility of business enterprise by periodic legal status reports. I do not put it beyond an inquiry that we might, through the law office as an institution capable of improving the legal health of people, find ways to reduce the dissatisfactions that Pound expressed concerning the administration of the courts. This forecast should not neglect a brief word about legal education, which, with its traditional attach- ment to the appellate court opinion, has sadly neglected the decisional processes of the law office. Perhaps a recognition that the law office is an institution will help to alert the academic community to a realization of its importance. Perhaps there will be a growing regard in academic for the intellectual achievements of lawyers — both litigators and preventive law lawyers. The adjustment of law teachers to this newer concern does not come easily. Appellate opinions are too beautiful, too numerous, and so easily available. We need, somehow, to make the decisional processes and inventions of lawyers as readily available. Many are certainly as intellectually beautiful as appellate court opinions. The educational processes in law schools color the emotions and minds of embryonic lawyers. When,

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