Hardback, paperback & ebook: Rosen on the Roles and Dilemmas of Attorneys in Advising Corporations

A Classic Dissertation, often used and cited for its path-breaking research on sociology and law, is at long last available worldwide.  With new Foreword and Preface. See it at Amazon and retailers listed below.

The recognized study of the disparate roles that corporate attorneys play in representing and advising their institutional clients. Long passed around and cited by scholars and lawyers as an unpublished manuscript, the book is also accessible to a wide audience and includes inside interviews. Professor Robert Rosen insightfully explores the choices that lawyers, managers and executives make about how lawyers are involved in corporate processes.

In the companies studied, Rosen showed that corporate lawyers were repeatedly intertwined in decisions—beyond those regarding mere legal compliance—ranging from finance to production to sales to returns to litigation. But the how, when and consequences of their involvements varied. The book analyzes these variations. It examines relations between inside and outside counsel and the management of the corporate legal function. It locates them in a taut framework of organization theory and institutional behavior, a frame and application since referenced for its cogency and explanatory power.

The author, now a senior professor at the University of Miami Law School, repeatedly calls on attorneys to understand the organizational context of their work. His book repeatedly calls out attorneys who ill serve their clients because they failed as organizational analysts. It has since been recognized by legal, ethical, and sociological theorists as a rich resource of corporate analysis and the divergent roles that lawyers play.

The groundbreaking research was conducted at six major manufacturing companies as Rosen interviewed a triad of inside counsel, outside counsel and managers who worked on particular problems. This novel method allowed self-serving statements (especially by the lawyers involved) to be checked and placed in realistic context. More important, because it triangulated how the legal problem was understood, the method brought out how the legal task had been structured. The frames that the lawyers, managers and organization imposed on the legal problems varied widely—and the sources and consequences of these variations are detailed and explained.

The book’s latest edition is now available from Quid Pro Books, but the manuscript has already had scholarly impact and praise. For example, the Yale Law Journal noted in 1996 that “Rosen’s important manuscript is widely cited in recent literature on legal professionalism.” It has been cited in articles in the law reviews of Boston University, Indiana-Bloomington, University of Maryland, and Emory, and the Law & Society Review. At bottom, researchers and pundits on corporate theory and lawyers’ roles have already had to account for this telling study, and at last they can readily reference it in a quality published format, in ebook and paperback editions.

“Lawyers in Corporate Decision-Making should be read by everyone interested in how law matters to organizations of all kinds.”
–Jonathan Simon,
Adrian A. Kragen Professor of Law,
UC Berkeley School of Law, and
MacCormick Fellow, Edinburgh University

“Rob Rosen’s study of in house counsel is a deft, subtle dissection of a complex world where nothing is as it quite seems. In interviewing in house counsel, outside counsel, and clients, Rosen captures, in a Rashomon-like way, the moral character of lawyers’ work–their choices, their pitches, their claims–by which they justify what they do. We see inside the professional black box.”
–John Flood, Professor of Law and Sociology, University of Westminster, London

“Widely regarded by experts in the field as a pioneering work in the sociology of the legal profession and a foundational piece in the slowly emerging canon of empirical research on inside counsel…. Not limited to rich, thick description, the study also normatively challenges the legal profession’s ideology of moral ‘independence.’ …With the long-awaited publication of this manuscript, corporate lawyers will have something to guide them.”
— Prof. Sung Hui Kim, UCLA School of Law, from the new Foreword

AVAILABILITY AND LINKS

From the Amazon Kindle store worldwide, and for free Kindle apps.

From Barnes & Noble for Nook.

At Google Play for Nexus and apps, and at Google Books here. All our ebooks are found at Play and more generally at Google Books.

Also available as an ebook from Kobobooks, the UK Amazon store, and direct on iBooks for iPad as previewed by Apple (or iPad users can use apps for Kindle, Nook).  And available in active PDF, ePub, Sony, online viewing, and simple rtf formats from Smashwords.

PAPERBACK AVAILABLE from Amazon and other retailers — or direct from our own eStore page for this book (fulfilled by Amazon).

HARDBACK (cloth cover) from Amazon, B&N, and other retailers. Libraries may order it from Ingram or Baker & Taylor catalogs (as may individuals). For classroom adoptions in bulk and similar institutional sales, please contact us.

WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING ABOUT THIS BOOK

New release blogged about at Discourse.net (Froomkin terming it a cult classic), Business Law Prof Blog, the Advanced Legal Studies@Westminster Blog and Random Academic Thoughts (Flood calling it wonderful), and others. Full review found at Jotwell by Christine Parker, who closes: “…here is a book well worth reading for how it demonstrates the value (in both senses of the word) of law and society research on corporate lawyers’ ethics.” Also look for Steven Vaughan’s extensive review in Sept. 2011 Journal of Law and Society.

Paperback identifiers:

ISBN-10 1-61027-039-8 and ISBN-13 9781610270397

Kindle: ISBN-13 9781610270403 and ePUB: ISBN-13 9781610270410

Clothbound hardback edition: ISBN-13 9781610270458