The legal profession
4
Law is one of the original professions; the others being medicine, the clergy (out of which grew university teaching) and, less frequently, the military. Several important cross-national differences exist between legal professions regarding their histories, organization, training, activities, status and prestige.1 The division between barristers and solicitors is characteristic of the English legal profession and is retained by some of its former colonial counterparts. As Weber observes, the reliance on judicial decisions or case law in the English, or common-law, legal system means that barristers skilled in oral argument assume a special prominence, prestige and influence. However, the emergence of the barrister as a distinct profession of advocates ‘was a slow and tentative process’ occurring in sixteenth century England, in part in response to increases in litigation (Prest, 1986: 5). The Bar is also significant in common-law systems, because it is from this pool that most members of the judiciary are appointed. Practising lawyers are less important on the European continent in terms of law making, and in Germany for many years it was not even necessary for a litigant to be represented by a lawyer (Weber, 1978: 785–90). Historically, the universities were more important as educators of lawyers and the state was more important as an employer of lawyers in the continental as compared to the English legal system, where legal training was by apprenticeship and most lawyers were in private practice, that is, self-employed (Abbott, 1988: 197–205; Macdonald, 1995: 72–7, 85–7, 91–2; Prest, 1986; Weber, 1978: 784–5). Because of the relative independence and power of the legal profession in common-law countries, lawyers (as a group) enjoy greater financial rewards and higher social status than their counterparts in civil-law countries.
Despite cross-national differences, the legal professions of all advanced capitalist societies have experienced a number of critical changes since the 1960s (Abel, 1985: 19–35; 1989), and particularly over the past two decades (Faulconbridge and Muzio, 2008; Heinz et al., 2005). There has been an enormous expansion in the number of lawyers, the proportion of women lawyers is increasing, lawyers are now more likely to be employed by large, bureaucratic organizations (including law firms, some of which have international offices), aspects of legal work are becoming routinized and deskilled due to technological change, the market for legal services has become more competitive, some dimensions of professional control are waning, and the legal profession has been subject to unprecedented public scrutiny in the form of government inquiries, media attention and criticism from consumers. While these changes seem most pronounced and best researched in the USA, the pattern of change is widespread (Galanter, 1992: 2; Muzio and Ackroyd, 2005). Some commentators conclude that these developments undermine professional autonomy, question lawyers’ claims to a professional status and herald deprofessionalization (Rothman, 1984). Others maintain that changes to the legal profession signal a redefinition of professionalism which becomes a hybrid of traditional professional ideals, especially collegial control, combined with the values of business and participation in a competitive market; lawyers have become ‘commercialised’ professionals (Hanlon, 1997; Heinz et al., 2005).
This chapter first examines theories of the professions, then investigates the considerable changes that legal professions have undergone over the past three decades and, finally, assesses some of the implications of these changes for the professional status of lawyers.
Theories of the professions
There are two broad theoretical approaches to the professions within sociology. The trait model focuses on identifying the key attributes of professional occupations, while market approaches view professions as emerging from the successful monopolization of skills, resources and clients.
Trait model
Prior to the 1960s, sociologists sought to distinguish professions from nonprofessions by identifying their core defining characteristics (Carr-Saunders and Wilson, 1933; Goode, 1957; Greenwood, 1957). They argued that professions are special and deserve their high social status, prestige and financial rewards. Despite scant agreement on the irreducible attributes of a profession, the most frequently enumerated include:
| (a) | formal educational and entrance requirements; |
| (b) | a monopolization of esoteric knowledge and associated skills; |
| (c) | autonomy over the terms and conditions of practice; |
| (d) | collegial authority vested in a code of ethics; |
| (e) | a professional association; and |
| (f) | the commitment to a service ideal. |
This attribute model emphasizes the special quality of professional knowledge and the professions’ ethical orientation towards clients. Professional knowledge and skills should be abstract and esoteric but also applicable to the solution of practical problems (Goode, 1969: 277). For Parsons, professional authority has a peculiar sociological structure in that it is based on and limited to superior technical competence (Parsons, 1954: 38). Because of the asymmetry of expertise, the client is not able to evaluate the advice or service of the professional and thus trusts him or her to perform the required tasks properly, especially if a failure to do so would cause harm (Goode, 1969: 296). On the distinctive professional–client relationship, Parsons writes:
The relation of attorney and client is a relation of ‘trust’ not of competition for profit; the client’s fee is for ‘service,’ not simply the best ‘bargain’ he [sic] can get in a competitive market; his [sic] communications to his [sic] attorney are protected by law and cannot be revealed in the attorney’s or any other interest. (Parsons, 1954: 374–5)
As well as a special relationship with clients, members of professions have a distinctive orientation to each other, in that the social organization of professional occupations is said to be collegial (Waters, 1989: 956). Members look to each other for professional recognition, control and protection. Parsons observes that, like the businessperson, the professional is oriented towards success, but they take different paths: the professional seeks occupational recognition and reputation, while the businessperson seeks financial success. Thus, professionals are not distinguished from businesspeople by their altruistic rather than self-interested behaviour, but they are ‘collectivity-oriented’ rather than ‘self-oriented’ (Parsons, 1954: 42–5, 375 fn 2).
Members of a profession who are all formally equal and expert are responsible for regulating each other’s conduct. Most professions have some kind of formal, written ethical code that prescribes obligations towards colleagues and vis-à-vis clients. Codes of ethics usually proscribe professionals from dealing with outsiders; for example, traditionally, lawyers were unable to form partnerships or attend court with nonlawyers. Professional codes have also prohibited intra-professional competition for clients and resources, thus rendering advertising, solicitation and price cutting unethical and unprofessional. The committee of the professional association is the location of most collegial decision making and regulation (Waters, 1989: 955–9). The council of the law society or bar association presides over complaints about members’ alleged unethical behaviour. This committee also sanctions professional misbehaviour, the ultimate punishment being to revoke a member’s practice licence and membership of the professional association. Ironically, while obligations toward peers predominate, sanctions for violation are not usually severe, whereas obligations to clients are few and specific but sanctions are the most radical following deviation (Abbott, 1983: 863; Carlin, 1966: 150–62). In a fascinating account of professional discipline, Daniel (1998) argues that to maintain their autonomy and a sense of collectivity and cohesion, plus some level of public accountability, the professions, every now and then, will identify and persecute scapegoats. The ‘crimes’ of such scapegoats may be relatively minor (not all members who are guilty of such ‘crimes’ will be scapegoated) or incidental; the purpose of scapegoating is not the punishment of an offender – because the sentence of banishment usually holds out no opportunity for expiation or reform – but a ritual cleansing of the profession and a reassertion of its distinctive identity. ‘Overall, the scapegoat’s timeless purpose is to relieve the group of its guilt’ (Daniel, 1998: 17).
Sociologists adopting the attribute approach may uncritically accept the official rhetoric of occupations claiming to be professions, thus becoming apologists for the power, prestige and monopolies on clients, tasks and skills of the established professions (Roth, 1974: 6). This approach does not identify the cultural, economic, political, social and historical conditions under which occupations will assert claims to professional status and success (Klegon, 1978: 267–8). Freidson suggests that the failure to identify a single definition of a profession derives from attempts to treat the concept as if it were generic, rather than as a changing historic notion with particular roots in an industrial nation strongly influenced by Anglo-American institutions (Crompton, 1990: 149–50; Freidson, 1994). Nonetheless, he warns against jettisoning any definition of profession by suggesting that: ‘One does not attempt to determine what profession is in an absolute sense so much as how people in a society determine who is a professional and who is not, how they “make” or “accomplish” professions by their activities, and what the consequences are for the way in which they see themselves and perform their work’ (Freidson, 1983: 279). For example, in England and the USA the title ‘profession’ was used to establish the status of successful occupations and appeared in official occupational classification schemes; it was not just a descriptive term. In contrast, in France the state was much more active in organizing both training through the grandes écoles and employment, which thereby reduced the professions’ autonomy (Abbott, 1988: 24–8).
Market-control approaches
Proponents of a more dynamic conception of professions will move away from talking about ‘the professions’ as though they are objective, immutable social categories and instead argue that professionalism is a strategy for organizing and controlling work; it is a type of occupational control, not an expression of the nature of a particular occupation (Johnson, 1972: 45; Macdonald, 1995: 17–35). Their central concern is to identify the social contexts and economic conditions that enable a particular occupational group to successfully claim and perpetuate their control over knowledge, skills or techniques, clients and themselves (Freidson, 1994: 173; Hughes, 1971: 375–7; Klegon, 1978: 270–6). The disagreement here is more about the origin and function of professional attributes than their existence: attribute theorists will view them as inherent properties of the established professions while control approaches will emphasize their attainment and importance in securing markets.
Professionalization can be viewed as an attempt to translate one type of scarce resource – special knowledge and skills – into another, namely economic rewards and social recognition. The modern reorganization of professional work and professional markets tends to be based on the claim to sole control of superior expertise and independence (at least in appearance), from the traditional and external guarantees of the social stratification order (Larson, 1977: 13). As a method of organizing the performance of work, professionalism differs from the free market and from bureaucracy in that it revolves around ‘the central principle that the members of a specialized occupation control their own work’ (Freidson, 1994: 173, emphasis deleted).
An important mechanism for controlling markets is placing restrictions on the numerical size of the profession through increasing educational requirements and admission standards. This achieves occupational closure and denies opportunities for practice to the noncredentialled (Macdonald, 1995: 27–9). Such closure is finalized by successfully obtaining a legislatively mandated monopoly on practice. Legal practitioner legislation defines ‘legal work’ (often some what differently in different jurisdictions) and reserves that work towards licensed lawyers. Once a practising certificate is obtained, the lawyer can offer services within the area reserved by legislation to licensed lawyers. The role of the state vis-à-vis education and its attitude to monopolies of expertise and skill are critical in the attainment of professional status (Larson, 1977: 15).
The rise of professional occupations, especially the legal profession, during the twentieth century is intertwined with the development of corporate capitalism. Observing a symbiotic relationship between business activities and the legal profession, Weber writes:
The increased need for specialized legal knowledge created the professional lawyer. The growing demand for experience and specialized knowledge and the consequent stimulus for increasing rationalization of the law have almost always come from the increasing significance of commerce and those participating in it. (1978: 775)
This relationship is characterized by the emergence in the USA in the early part of the twentieth century of the large urban law firm, whose clients were business entrepreneurs and corporations (Smigel, 1964: 1–17). In contrast, legal professions in other countries were unprepared to take full advantage of the opportunities that capitalist development presented and accordingly their histories and structures differ. For example, English solicitors lost the preeminent position that American lawyers rapidly gained in the twentieth century (Abbott, 1988: 275). As these solicitors relied on clerkship for legal training, their numbers could not expand rapidly to respond to new areas of potential legal work. Tradition, etiquette and the fact that training neophyte lawyers could not be the sole task of solicitors, who also had clients, meant that they could take on only a few clerks. Solicitors could not respond to new opportunities in the business and governmental spheres and their staple work remained conveyancing. In comparison, the development and popularity of law schools in the USA greatly increased the supply of lawyers, especially as a law degree took two years and a clerkship five. Combined with a less interventionist government, the rapid expansion in the number of lawyers enabled the legal profession, or at least the elite segments of it, to make successful claims to new work and clients, especially in business activities, in the USA.
The obverse of control is competition. Abbott argues that ‘control of knowledge and its application means dominating outsiders who attack that control. Control without competition is trivial’ (Abbott, 1988: 2). He conceptualizes the professions as forming an interdependent system where each performs activities within various kinds of jurisdiction, the boundaries of which can be relatively stable or contested, and will change over time depending on a range of social, economic and cultural factors. The control of work brings the professions into conflict with each other and makes their histories interdependent, and it is these interprofessional relations that are potentially the central feature of professional development (Abbott, 1986: 189). Jurisdictional claims can be made in several possible arenas (Abbott, 1988: 59–60):
- The legal system, which can confer formal control of legal work. Acts of Parliament usually provide that only licensed legal practitioners can provide legal advice. Law societies lobby governments to guarantee lawyers’ monopoly on conveyancing, for example, in the face of competition from land brokers, banks and real estate agents. Other changes affect the legal division of labour, for example reforms to rights of audience allow solicitors to appear in lower courts, historically the exclusive preserve of barristers (Prest, 1986).
- Public opinion, where professions build images that pressure the legal system. Lawyers and their professional associations often advocate legal change by issuing press statements, conducting interviews, and addressing public meetings and other public activities. They usually claim that their interests are aligned or are even synonymous with the public interest and the needs of potential clients. For example, plans by one Australian state government (Victoria) to allow nonlawyers to represent people in court were met by the president of the Law Institute’s claims that the proposal ‘represents the most significant threat to the rights of clients to quality legal representation and advocacy in many years’ (Coffey, 1995).
- The workplace, where successful claims blur and distort the official lines of legally and publicly established jurisdiction. Lawyers employed by government departments and business corporations will seek to demarcate their work from that of nonlawyers. Even in law offices, work will be negotiated between lawyers, paralegals and clerical/administrative staff. In the courtroom, lawyers face competition from the police, probation officers, social workers and other professions, including medical practitioners, psychiatrists and psychologists, who provide expert evidence. One way in which barristers seek to reassert their dominance in the courtroom is to discredit other professionals’ knowledge and credibility or seek to have their evidence declared inadmissible in court.2
- The successful claim to monopolize certain areas of work and clients excludes, or reduces, the number of potential competitors. For the most part, until recently, solicitors have been successful in monopolizing conveyancing work, thereby excluding or restricting such other occupations as land brokers, sometimes termed conveyancers. In England and Wales solicitors’ monopoly over conveyancing was removed in the 1980s.
- There can be a reduction in the control or loss of a jurisdiction. Some areas of legal work are increasingly being performed by other professions and occupations, for example tax accountants will interpret tax laws and provide advice to clients; public servants will advise clients of their legal rights and obligations vis-à-vis the government.
- Subordination of a competitor may be attempted. In a number of jurisdictions, lawyers employed by the Director of Public Prosecutions or District Attorney have taken over criminal prosecution work in the lower courts, which previously had been the sole domain of the police.
- A final division of labour can be formed, either in terms of the content of the work or the nature of the client, thereby splitting the jurisdiction into two more or less independent parts. The redefinition of core tasks typically entails the delegation of less skilled, simple and uninteresting tasks to lower-status occupations (Wilensky, 1964: 144). In some law offices such routine legal work as research, document searches and initial interviews with clients is performed by paralegals, which is a relatively new occupation (Johnstone and Wenglinsky, 1985: 15–65).
Legal work
Contrary to popular perceptions and media representations, the bulk of lawyers’ work does not occur in the courtroom; indeed, very little legal work entails preparing for or undertaking litigation. The tasks lawyers perform include:
| (a) | offering advice regarding citizens’ responsibilities, entitlements and rights; |
| (b) | representing clients’ – both corporate and individual – interests in various negotiations; |
| (c) | drawing up legal documents, including contracts, statutes and articles of association for corporations and voluntary organizations; |
| (d) | settling or mediating disputes either in or out of courts, other tribunals, or other fora; |
| (e) | court work, which entails the prosecution or defence of persons accused of criminal offences and representing clients’ interests in civil litigation. |
According to Parsons (1954: 375), the legal profession holds an ‘interstitial’ position in the social structure, that is, lawyers will mediate between legal rules and the practical situations that clients present. The settings where lawyers work include the following.
Solo practice: a single lawyer who is self-employed, usually located in rural, regional or suburban areas.
Law firms: are organized as partnerships; some members are partners and share in the firm’s profits, whereas others are salaried associates. Promotion to partnership often involves an ‘up or out’ policy, where associates who do not make partner must leave the firm and those who do will have a life tenure. The large law firm became a particular institutional phenomenon during the twentieth century and is the subject of considerable socio-legal research (Galanter and Palay, 1991; Smigel, 1964). Large law firms serve mostly business clients who require ongoing legal advice and are based in major metropolitan and financial centres, especially New York City and London, and often have branches throughout the world. Divisions of labour also exist among lawyers employed by the same firm and engaged in the same substantive areas of law. Using the language of a senior partner in a large firm whom he interviewed, Nelson distinguishes between finders, minders and grinders (Nelson, 1981: 119–26). Finders are entrepreneurs who establish and govern the basic structure of the firm and have the most responsibility for recruiting clients, sometimes termed ‘rainmaking’. Minders are the managing partners who seek to coordinate a large staff working in various fields of law. Grinders are the associates and newer partners who perform the day-to-day legal work.
Government offices: legal departments, for example the Attorney-General’s Department, the office of the Director of Public Prosecutions, will hire lawyers whose tasks may include drafting legislation, interpreting legislation, undertaking legal research, preparing cases for litigation, undertaking legal action, and offering legal advice to government. Lawyers are also employed in a variety of other government departments and positions.
Law schools: following World War II the university-based law school has become the predominant form of legal education. Legal academics may simultaneously practise law, but this is not usually a requirement.
Business corporations: many corporations will hire their own in-house counsel to perform day-to-day legal tasks and to liaise with any outside legal firm with which it has a retainer.
Legal aid schemes and public defenders’ offices: established by many governments in the 1960s and 1970s to ensure that people with few economic resources, especially those defending criminal charges, could have access to legal representation. Different models of lawyering are adopted in legal aid commissions and legal aid lawyers are often progressive social activists committed to the alleviation of social inequalities. Legal aid commissions will hire their own lawyers as well as nonlawyers and recruit volunteers. They will also brief private legal practitioners.
The judiciary: in common-law countries appointment to judicial office usually follows on from an extensive legal career. Judges of the higher courts are typically recruited from the senior ranks of the Bar, usually via a fairly informal and opaque process (Darbyshire, 2007; Mack and Roach Anleu, 2008). Depending on the jurisdiction judges in lower courts can be recruited from diverse legal and nonlegal backgrounds. For example, many magistrates in England and Wales are lay, do not have legal training and are voluntary, whereas in many other common-law countries magistrates are legally qualified judicial officers (Roach Anleu and Mack, 2007). In civil-law systems the judiciary is part of a career structure and the decision to pursue the judicial path is made much earlier on in a career.
Other settings: including various nongovernment and professional associations and social movement organizations oriented to social change through law reform. This is sometimes known as public interest or cause lawyering. Belief in a cause and a desire to advance it will drive cause lawyering actions (Hilbink, 2004: 659). Activist lawyering includes feminist law firms and practices (Epstein, 1983: 130–61) and poverty lawyers who aim to enforce welfare rights through the courts. Cause lawyering entails ethical dilemmas arising from a tension between the interests of the individual client and the broader social cause to which the lawyer is morally or politically committed (Dotan, 1999). Research on cause lawyering usually focuses on social justice or welfare activism, often downplaying the existence of right-wing cause lawyers (Heinz et al., 2003). Much of the work of the conservative movement – conservative religious organisations, libertarians, nationalists, and business interests – occurs through not for profit foundations in which lawyers will play an important role.
The actual mix of legal tasks performed depends on the work setting, the field of substantive law and the types of clients with whom the lawyer interacts. Lawyers who perform mainly corporate work will be more likely to be engaged in negotiating and drawing up contracts, and advising clients of their legal obligations, compared with criminal lawyers who will defend their clients against criminal charges or family lawyers who are concerned with settling disputes. The everyday work of lawyers is often far removed from the image of legal work as the application of technical rules to unambiguous facts and preparing for litigation. Lawyers’ work entails translating clients’ concerns into legal questions and remedies, managing uncertainty, diverting clients from the formal legal system and negotiating and seeking consensual outcomes with lawyers for other parties to the dispute, both in civil and criminal cases.
Clients will bring various issues, concerns and experiences to a lawyer that they will express in various everyday discourses. Rather than inevitably subordinating or controlling the client and their desired outcomes, the lawyer will then translate and reconstitute the issues in terms of a legal discourse that has trans-situational applicability. For example, a client’s concern that his or her children should inherit any real estate (a concern for family relations) will be translated into legal questions about the type of tenancy and the resulting ownership potentialities and capacities. The skill of the lawyer derives from the extent to which the statements that she or he formulates in legal discourse produce a legal outcome that is congruent with the outcome that the client articulates in everyday nonlegal language (Cain, 1983: 111–8). Lawyers will accept their clients’ desired outcome, especially where the clients are powerful and prestigious and where the solicitor seeks to establish an on-going relationship with the client as a source of future legal work. Nevertheless, the process of translation is not automatic and sometimes lawyers will refuse to do it, especially in cases where individuals bring one-off problems and where the solicitors are integrated with the profession and perhaps do not wish to risk being regarded as ‘unreasonable’ or ‘unconventional’ by other lawyers or actors within the justice system (Cain, 1983: 122–8).
While the solicitors Cain discusses primarily deal with middle-class clients, an Australian study of legal aid and community legal centres, which deal with disadvantaged clients, illustrates the ways in which lawyers will choose to help particular clients and turn others away (Parker, 1994: 149). In interviews with clients, the lawyer asks questions in order to fit their story into a typology based on the lawyer’s previous knowledge and experience of the type of problems that such clients have. The lawyer controls the interview and seeks to mould the client’s problems into the typology as a way of efficiently managing a large caseload (see also Sudnow, 1965). This also discourages clients from expecting or demanding that the lawyer become personally committed to the details of their individual case. Clients who refuse to accept the lawyer’s assessment of the situation and follow his or her advice regarding the appropriate response are viewed as difficulties to be managed. For the lawyer, such clients are refusing to accept legal reality or are trying to demand the achievement of an inappropriate objective (Parker, 1994: 157). Lawyers will respond by refusing to empower the client and terminating the interview.
In the criminal courts defence lawyers – both in private practice and employed by legal aid – will often become agent-mediators who will help the accused to redefine the situation and restructure their perceptions commensurate with entering a plea of guilty (Blumberg, 1967: 20). The lawyers’ relationships with prosecutors, the police and other court officials may be more important than a brief encounter with a particular client, thus the needs and interests of the latter are subordinate to those of the former, who are important for the lawyer’s career and achievements in the legal system. From the point of view of the lawyer, tension will exist between the pressures to process large numbers of criminal cases and the ideological and legal requirements of the due process of law and advocacy. Lawyers will adopt such strategies as creating anxiety for the client regarding the risks of going to trial and appearing to be of help and service to their interests, which tend to lead to a guilty plea (Blumberg, 1967: 22–8; see also Chapter 6). Many lawyers, including law teachers, would agree that the success of litigators relies on their ability to manipulate people’s emotions for the specific goal of winning a case in the very competitive trial environment. Pierce argues that the majority of litigators who ‘do dominance’ are men and this can involve intimidation to impugn a witness’s credibility and strategic friendliness to win a witness over (Pierce, 1996: 1–5). This masculinized form of emotional labour relying on manipulation and pragmatism contributes to the exclusion of women lawyers from trial work or a perception among court personnel, other lawyers and the public that women are not as effective as litigators as men.
An in-depth analysis of the lawyer–client interaction in divorce cases identifies the ways in which lawyers and clients will negotiate their different views of law and the legal process and how this influences courses of action (Sarat and Felstiner, 1986: 96). The most common pattern is an exchange in which the lawyer persuades a somewhat reluctant client to try to reach a negotiated settlement. This involves three steps. First, the legal process itself is discussed and interpreted, which prepares the way ahead for a decision about settlement by providing the client with a sense of the values and operations inherent in formal adjudication. The lawyer describes the court process as involving risks stemming from the human frailties of judicial decision makers, the contradictions between appearance and reality, carelessness, incoherence, accident and built-in limitations. This creates in the client doubts about the legal process, while reassuring them of the wisdom of relying on the legal adviser. ‘What the lawyer can provide is not a corpus juris learned in law school or available in any texts but rather a personal view of how the legal system actually works in the community in which he [sic] is practicing’ (Sarat and Felstiner, 1986: 131). Secondly, there is a discussion on how best to dispose of the case. Lawyers will tend to construct an image that settlement is the appropriate mode of dealing with the case, which counters the conventional view that lawyers will escalate disputes by contesting every point, inducing competition and hostility and transforming noncontentious clients into adversaries. The third dimension of the discussion involves considering what the client will have to do and how they will have to behave if a settlement is to be reached. This involves the ‘legal construction of the client’, where lawyers will help their clients view the emotional process of dissolving an intimate relationship in instrumental terms, especially regarding a property settlement and other financial issues.
An ethnographic study of an elite corporate law firm in Chicago finds that the central role of business lawyers not engaged in litigation is managing uncertainty, both for themselves and their clients (Flood, 1991: 42–3). Three main tasks constitute the everyday work of business lawyers: advising, negotiating and drafting documents. These lawyers rarely enter a courtroom and are in constant negotiations with other lawyers and their clients to effect commercial or financial deals. The critical uncertainty is that a deal may collapse; the corporate world is fickle and changes in such external economic events as interest rates or share prices can cause potential contracts to fail. This may result in the loss of a valued corporate client and reduced income to the firm, which places great emphasis on establishing and maintaining almost avuncular relationships with clients who seek advice on a wide range of issues; the distinction between strictly legal and other advice thus disappears.