Lawyer Roles in Knowledge Work: Defender, Enabler, Investigator

This book provides the first thorough examination of the concept of lawyer roles in knowledge work, offering a detailed comparative exploration and analysis of the globalized legal services industry in terms of individual and corporate professional function. Knowledge management has long been identified by scholars within the business sphere as a key strategic device in the development of complex organizations and developing markets. However, this essential process has been largely ignored within socio-legal studies and professional practice applications as a specific subject for close scrutiny. Lawyer Roles in Knowledge Work seeks to address this anomaly, with Gottschalk and Hamerton recognizing the strong lineage and correlation that exists between the study of knowledge management and contemporary legal practice. Using an interdisciplinary focus which includes illustrative case-studies, the book explores European, North American, and global perspectives as well as models to identify, position, and reveal the forward-looking lawyer as defender, enabler, and investigator. In doing so it revaluates current strategic legal practice and organisational behaviour within the context of changing patterns of business, the workplace, social rules, systems of governance, decision making, social ordering and control.

Whilst this book is principally focused on the three titular roles of defender, enabler, and investigator, it acknowledges and explains that there are other functionary positions frequently occupied by lawyers, such as the role of the bureaucrat who acts for the government and its executive agencies. Lewis and Mulcahy (2021) described lawyers in bureaucracies in terms of their knowledge needs related to law-making processes, regulations, and policy. They found that bureaucrats’ knowledge work involves collaboration and compromise in government circles. Other lawyer roles in knowledge work include prosecutor, judge, and corporate legal officers. However, the three roles of defender, enabler, and investigator developed and scrutinized in this book were chosen on the basis that they all involve the lawyer working for a client where the lawyer receives payment depending on the magnitude of completed work activities, and where the lawyer might become subject to disciplinary action depending on misconduct. In this regard Lawyer Roles in Knowledge Work aims to offer a unique and nuanced comparative treatment of a developmental field within contemporary legal practice and strategic management studies. The book will speak to students of law, business management, criminology, and sociology, along with legal practitioners and professionals within allied fields.