Lawyers on Their Own: The Solo Practitioner in an Urban Setting

Jerome Carlin’s LAWYERS ON THEIR OWN is a recognized, foundational study of lawyers in individual practice in an urban setting. It became the template for an important form of social science research into lawyers in solo practice. The first extensive and grounded study of individual practitioners and their candid quotes in interviews, Carlin exposed the unique practices, class divides, ethical dilemmas and ultimate resentments of a little-viewed subgroup of attorneys and their clients. This book’s findings and research methodology influenced many such studies of attorneys in action that followed it. The author’s succinct and supported writing has proved to be an enduring and important study in this field of socio-legal research. Updated with the author’s extensive introduction to the second edition, as well as a new foreword by law professor William Gallagher, this modern republication is presented to a new generation of readers and researchers into the daily lives, work, business angles and unique challenges of solo and individual-client law practice.