Page:Harvard Law Review Volume 10.djvu/60

34 34 HARVARD LAW REVIEW. tion between the lawyer and the business man has vanished; that the lawyer is no longer the ill fed chap with a green bag snivelling for a fee, and constantly ridiculed in the older comedies; but that he is to-day the indispensable guide to the business man, and should constantly be in his client's counting-room or ready by tel- ephone. This view of the relation enables the lawyer to say to his wealthy client, "Your trust in me is fully justified. Don t draw a long will showing your intentions in detail, but leave your accu- mulated treasure to me absolutely as residuary legatee; I will dis- tribute your fortune after your death as you may secretly instruct me, or as you would if living have given it under my advice." In this view, too, the lawyer is transformed into the promoter and broker, and goes abroad as the agent of trusts. In fact, the largest item in some of the great charges made by lawyers in this city within the last ten years has been simply brokerage. Some law- yers abroad for foreign capital at the time the house of the Barings was shaken have been stranded there ever since, showing that the " new method " is not necessarily progressive. Corporations furnish bonds and security needed in all manner of legal proceedings ; they have long stood ready to be executors, trus- tees, and guardians, and are more and more made use of for those purposes; they have, as shown later in this article, about absorbed title-searching, and a few months ago the birth of a local corporation was announced to give legal advice by written opinions in answer to written inquiries, for two dollars and fifty cents apiece, postage included. This is an approximation to practising law "on wind" and the writer regrets he cannot report the result so far. Thirty years ago, the late John K. Potter alleged that to be a corporation was negligence Z^?-^^. There has been a great reaction, and it is now negligence /^r j^ to attempt anything except under corporate guise. We may expect even to hear of corporations formed to furnish testimony, — if not indeed to testify on trial. These existing circumstances, — and there are others, — lead to the conclusion that lawyers in New York seek a dollar for what it is worth, and that the law is a business by which it is growing- harder to get dollars. There are startling instances of financial success at the bar not really attributable to professional skill or service, though when this success appears law business multiplies. For instance, a quiet inconspicuous conveyancer may suddenly move into large costly offices with a horde of clerks, and have a bustling office