This book has provided the first thorough examination of the concept of lawyer roles in knowledge work, offering a detailed comparative exploration and analysis of the globalized legal services industry in terms of individual and corporate professional function. Knowledge management has long been identified by scholars in the business sphere as a key strategic device in the development of complex organizations and developing markets. Nevertheless, this essential process has been largely ignored within socio-legal studies and professional practice applications as a specific subject for close scrutiny. This book has addressed this anomaly. It has recognized the strong lineage and correlation that exists between the study of knowledge management and contemporary legal practice. Using an interdisciplinary focus which included illustrative case studies, the book has explored European, North American, and global perspectives and models to identify, position, and reveal the forward-looking lawyer as defender, enabler, and investigator . In doing so, it has re-evaluated current strategic legal practice and organizational behavior within the context of changing patterns of business, workplaces, social rules, systems of governance, decision making, social ordering, and control.

A founding premise of this book was that a lawyer is fundamentally a knowledge worker providing legal services to clients. In the role of enabler, the lawyer tends to be in a long-term relationship with the client. This is an enduring relationship involving some level of permanence. Lawyers experience stability as they recognize repeated work elements and interactions with the same clients. Social identification at work is in the tradition of being understood in terms of partnership or another role in the law firm with a stable group of corporate and/or individual clients. There is an enduring and significant relationship with others at work as well as with continuing clients in the market for legal services. In the roles of defender and investigator, the lawyer tends to be in a shortterm relationship with the client, forming temporary relationships again and again in their working lives. Such transient relationships derive from a project-based organization of work, with arrangements existing as inherently disposable exchanges that are disbanded on the completion of work. There are short-term, unpredictable transactions in transient relationships, with legal professionals experiencing temporary, transient, and restricted (if repeated) elements of relationships.