Uberizing the Legal Profession? Three Essays on Lawyers in Digital Platform-based Legal Services

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2021-03

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Abstract

Using a set of data from an Internet-based legal service platform in China, this thesis examines the impacts of digital platform-based legal services on lawyers and their work. With interview data with lawyers actively working on this platform, Chapter 1 finds that supplementary income and flexibility are the two major motives for lawyers to engage in platform work. Nevertheless, when working online, lawyers face lower intra-professional status and lower professional autonomy. Despite its growth, the digital legal market is imposing a minimal threat to the traditional legal market due to the lack of interference in labour supply and demand between these two markets.Building on the concept of “counter-institutional identity”, Chapter 2 uses a grounded theory approach to develop a theoretical model that explores the processes of the emergence of identity threats and lawyers’ coping tactics as they work on this platform, a work setting that opposes the dominant norms in the legal field. I find that identity threats emerge when lawyers’ existing professional identity is challenged by counter-institutional work features. Moreover, some lawyers are able to restructure their professional identity to adapt to the counter-institutional work, while some are prone to protect their old identity and resist changes. Individuals’ belief in professional dynamism, the belief that the legal profession is and will be experiencing constant changes, underlies the divergence between identity restructuring and protection. Chapter 3 examines the ways in which technology-driven innovations impact professional stratification in digital platform-based legal services. With topic modeling to uncover the platform work content and thereby locate the involved lawyers’ market positioning, this study finds that digital platform-based services are dominated by low-status personal legal work. No evidence is found for higher levels of activity among young and female lawyers on this platform, suggesting that digital platform-based practices may not enlarge the disparities between demographic groups of lawyers. Moreover, digital legal work provides more equal opportunities for disadvantaged lawyers: young lawyers have earnings advantages over older lawyers and a gender earnings gap is not observed.

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lawyers, online gig work, professional autonomy, professional identity, professional status, professional stratification

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