For at least half a century, sociolegal scholarship has been shaped by a central insight: the legal profession is stratified. Lawyers’ careers are structured by hierarchies of prestige, income, and authority, themselves patterned by the intersecting forces of class, race, gender, and institutional affiliation. That insight has proven remarkably durable. Across changing empirical contexts, new datasets, and shifting theoretical frameworks, the conclusion has remained strikingly consistent: inequality is not incidental to legal careers but constitutive of them (Heinz and Laumann Reference Heinz and Laumann1982).
The contributions gathered in this symposium invite a broader consideration: what questions about lawyers’ careers become visible when we treat the findings of After the JD not as an endpoint, but as a point of departure? We use this coda to identify a set of questions that emerge from—and extend beyond—those engaged in this symposium.
Many of the core insights developed in research on professional stratification, including those advanced in After the JD, remain robust. Yet viewed from the vantage point of contemporary transformations in legal work, those insights invite expansion. This essay takes up that task by suggesting a shift from a framework centered on stratification to one attentive to reconfiguration under changing institutional conditions (Garth et al. Reference Garth, Sterling, Sandefur, Nelson, Dinovitzer and Plickert2004; Nelson et al. Reference Nelson, Dinovitzer, Sandefur, Garth, Sterling and Plickert2009; Nelson et al. Reference Nelson, Dinovitzer, Sandefur, Garth, Sterling and Plickert2014; Nelson et al. Reference Nelson, Dinovitzer, Sandefur, Garth, Sterling and Plickert2023).
The problem is not that the stratification account is mistaken, nor that its purchase has been exhausted. On the contrary, its central claims have been repeatedly confirmed. The question is whether that framework, developed to explain the structure and reproduction of inequality within a relatively coherent professional field, can fully capture the ways those structures are being reorganized under contemporary conditions. We suggest that it requires supplementation by an analysis attentive to the reorganization of the field’s hierarchies and also to the political and economic transformations that open some opportunities and close others.
Under current conditions, inequality is not simply reproduced; it is reconfigured. By reconfiguration, we do not mean the displacement of enduring structures of professional inequality, but the reorganization of the mechanisms through which those structures are produced and sustained. These mechanisms often appear internal to the profession but are produced (or reproduced) in response to shifting political and economic conditions. The task for scholarship is therefore not only to document durable hierarchies, but to theorize the processes through which those hierarchies are being reorganized.
I. The Achievements—and Reach—of the Stratification Paradigm
The stratification paradigm has yielded a rich and compelling account of lawyers’ careers. It has been demonstrated that the legal profession is organized around persisting hierarchies, most notably between corporate and individual client sectors, and within those sectors across firm size, prestige, and practice area. It has shown that early career placements are highly consequential, shaping subsequent opportunities through the accumulation of valued forms of capital—educational credentials, professional networks, reputational markers—that structure mobility over time. And it has documented the persistence of inequalities by race, gender, and class, even as formal barriers to entry have been dismantled (Heinz and Laumann Reference Heinz and Laumann1982; Hagan and Kay Reference Hagan and Kay1995; Nelson et al. Reference Nelson, Dinovitzer, Sandefur, Garth, Sterling and Plickert2023).
Equally important, this body of work has illuminated the mechanisms through which inequality is reproduced. Drawing on Bourdieusian and related frameworks, scholars have shown how ostensibly neutral criteria—merit, fit, professionalism—encode and legitimize social hierarchies (Bourdieu Reference Bourdieu1977; Bourdieu Reference Bourdieu and John1986; Lin Reference Lin2001). They have demonstrated how lawyers themselves internalize and enact these structures, reproducing them through everyday practices of evaluation, selection, and self-presentation. The result is a picture of a field that is both dynamic and stable: open enough to admit change, but structured in ways that sustain hierarchy.
Our earlier work contributed to this account by tracing how lawyers’ trajectories are shaped over time through the interaction of institutional location, career mobility, and social differentiation (Garth et al. Reference Garth, Sterling, Sandefur, Nelson, Dinovitzer and Plickert2004; Nelson et al. Reference Nelson, Dinovitzer, Sandefur, Garth, Sterling and Plickert2009; Nelson et al. Reference Nelson, Dinovitzer, Sandefur, Garth, Sterling and Plickert2014; Nelson et al. Reference Nelson, Dinovitzer, Sandefur, Garth, Sterling and Plickert2023). Many of those findings remain deeply relevant. Yet one implication of the symposium contributions, and of developments in legal work more broadly, is that the object of analysis itself may be changing. The central challenge is therefore not whether stratification remains real—it plainly does—but whether the structures through which it operates can still be understood through the same analytic frame.
The move from stratification to reconfiguration should be understood in this sense, not as abandoning earlier insights, but as extending them under changed historical conditions.
II. The Fragmentation of the Professional Field
One of the most significant developments in recent decades has been the growing fragmentation of the space of legal work. The long-standing distinction between corporate and individual client sectors remains analytically valuable, but it no longer captures the full complexity of the contemporary landscape. What we increasingly observe is a proliferation of partially overlapping, weakly integrated, and differently governed domains of practice.
At one pole, elite corporate law firms continue to occupy a dominant position, characterized by high levels of compensation, global reach, and close alignment with business interests. At another pole, the personal client sphere—particularly solo and small-firm practices serving individual clients—has become increasingly precarious under conditions of persistent economic pressure (Levin Reference Levin2004). Between and beyond these poles lie a range of other domains: in-house counsel roles, government and public interest positions, compliance and regulatory work, and hybrid forms of legal and quasi-legal service provision.
At the same time, the boundaries of the profession itself are under pressure. Non-lawyer service providers, technological platforms, and alternative models of dispute resolution increasingly complicate the assumption that legal services are the exclusive province of licensed attorneys. This ensemble of changes is the culmination of increasing market competition that has been embraced not just in the corporate sector, but in the people law sector and even in access to justice innovations.
These developments do not dissolve professional structure; they reorganize the terrain in which careers unfold. A more useful lens may be to view lawyers’ careers as embedded in fragmented institutional ecologies (Abbott Reference Abbott1988; Dinovitzer and Garth Reference Dinovitzer and Garth2020), only partially integrated and subject to different forms of governance.
III. Careers as Life-Course Trajectories
A life-course perspective treats careers as trajectories shaped by the timing of events, the accumulation and conversion of different forms of capital, and the interaction between individual choices and structural constraints (which also shape the choices). Early career placements remain important, but they are not destiny. Mid- and late-career stages become critical sites for observing how trajectories are consolidated, redirected, or disrupted (Elder Reference Elder1999; Hagan and Kay Reference Hagan and Kay1995).
A life-course approach also foregrounds cohort effects. Lawyers entering the profession at different historical moments encounter distinct configurations of opportunity and constraint (Yang and Land Reference Yang and Land2013). Comparing cohorts offers a way to distinguish enduring structures from historically contingent dynamics and highlights the very real differences (or consistencies) in the value of forms of capital across different moments of the political economy.
IV. Reconfiguring Capital Under Conditions of Disruption
If fragmentation describes the reorganization of the terrain in which careers unfold, reconfiguration also requires attention to how advantage is reproduced differently within that terrain. A central issue, we suggest, is the changing valuation and convertibility of capital.
Technological change provides one example. The increasing use of artificial intelligence and related legal technologies may alter the distribution of tasks within legal practice, particularly by reducing forms of routine work that have traditionally served as entry points for junior lawyers (Caserta and Madsen Reference Caserta and Madsen2019; Faulconbridge, Sarwar, and Spring Reference Faulconbridge, Sarwar and Spring2025).
Organizational and political developments raise parallel questions. Changes in workplace structure may affect the mechanisms through which social capital is accumulated and deployed. Pressures on legal institutions may reshape the symbolic value attached to different career paths and professional roles.
Reconfiguration, in this sense, occurs through shifts in the relationship between capital and career outcomes.
V. Beyond the Profession: New Objects of Sociolegal Inquiry
If the concept of the profession is becoming a less complete analytic container, one answer is to shift attention from professions as bounded entities to the broader social organization of legal work. This entails examining not only lawyers but the wider range of actors involved in the production, interpretation, and application of law.
Government lawyers, particularly at state and local levels, remain comparatively understudied within this literature, despite growing evidence that their roles are increasingly consequential not only for understanding state power and administrative governance but also for analyzing the political alignments, ideological conflicts, and institutional vulnerabilities of lawyering made visible in recent research on lawyers during the Trump era (Cummings Reference Cummings2025; Wald Reference Wald, Scott, Butter, Hammerslev and Rodríguez2025).
Careers are not merely individual trajectories; they are part of the infrastructure through which law operates. Understanding how they are structured and how they are changing is therefore central to understanding law itself.
VI. Lawyers follow Power: Rethinking Lawyers’ Careers in Evolving Contexts
A reconfiguration framework requires not only an account of how the terrain of legal work has changed, but an account of what has been driving the change. The stratification literature, including our own, has shown that hierarchy in the profession reflects not prejudice or implicit bias alone but structural features — paternalism, racism, classism, nationalism, and other isms — that change slowly if at all. It is tempting to read those findings as a call to exhort firms to work harder at equal opportunity or as a verdict that large corporate practice is the problem. Our preferred reading is different: even the statuses that appear undervalued in legal careers today are forms of capital whose value may appreciate in some contexts and depreciate in others as the political-economic terrain shifts.
While stratification analyses draw attention to the more proximate sources and consequences of stasis and change, we begin by revisiting a basic insight that deserves to be made explicit: lawyers follow power. The composition, ideology, and institutional location of elite legal practice track the structure of political and economic power, and shift as that structure shifts. Lawyers follow power because what they have to offer is legitimacy that allows the powerful to thrive. Lawyers and legal scholars compete to find legal doctrines and organizations that will serve changing regimes.
The ways in which politics and economic interests can collide to produce shifts in the value of capital are well demonstrated in Ronen Shamir’s account of lawyers in the New Deal (Shamir Reference Shamir1995). While elite lawyers opposed the New Deal alongside their corporate clients, the relative outsiders—disproportionately Jewish and Catholic lawyers—developed the theories and mechanisms that legalized the New Deal, built the Washington corporate-regulatory bar, and made lawyers and legal doctrines once again central to government and economy. The same dynamic is visible in reverse in the rise of the law-and-economics and Federalist Society networks after 1980. There are many such accounts, in his work and others, and in each we observe a reconfiguration of which forms of capital appreciated, which depreciated, and which trajectories were available to whom—all within adaptation to serve a new political and economic orthodoxy. This perspective—and the account of our book—produces a narrative in which we see opportunities open up and opportunities taken and created by those whose pathways were previously blocked.
From this lens, the “fragmentation” identified in the contemporary profession is not something that simply happened to the profession; it is the product of neoliberalism and its competition, new markets, new technologies, and new practice settings, to which the overwhelming majority of lawyers have adapted in order to remain relevant. The profession’s resistance to this reorganization is mostly rhetorical. Law firms are, in fact, more competitive in virtually every setting, from corporate practice to public-interest work, and that competitive pressure is a feature of the political-economic terrain rather than a deviation from it.
The recent capitulation of major firms to pressure from the Trump administration illustrates this point. It is tempting to interpret these as professional lapses. Such an interpretation reinforces a presumed moral hierarchy between corporate greed and legal professionalism as idealized in most law schools. A reconfiguration analysis suggests that firms capitulated because that was also what their clients and their leading partners preferred, which is essential to the firms’ prosperity. This is consistent with a terrain in which the convertibility of professional capital into income depends on alignment with concentrated economic power.
There is always an internal story shaping and shaped by evolving reconfigurations, but we learn more by emphasizing the less often studied sociological processes behind the driving forces. Life-course trajectories continue to capture how forms of capital are accumulated, converted, and sometimes lost, but these do not challenge the structure. Indeed, the innovations proposed to solve the access-to-justice crisis, such as deregulation of law schools or the profession, are themselves consistent with the market orientation and fragmentation of the current moment. Now, perhaps, the crisis of inequality in legal careers is losing its audience.
VII. Conclusion: From Reproduction to Reconfiguration
This essay has argued for a shift from stratification to reconfiguration. Rather than treating inequality as a fixed outcome within a stable structure, we suggest analyzing it as a process unfolding across time, shaped by the interaction of individual trajectories and broader institutional and political-economic transformations. The study of stratification also places scholarly attention at the top of the profession, leaving aside evolving practices that may be consequential in particular settings.
But the move from stratification to reconfiguration is not a move from structure to fluidity. It is a move from a more static understanding of hierarchy to a more dynamic account of how hierarchy is reorganized under changing conditions.
The central question, then, is no longer simply how inequality is reproduced within a profession, but how transformations in the organization of legal work are reshaping who can build legal careers and under what conditions.
