ABSTRACT
Legal executives are fully qualified lawyers and hold positions of responsibility in every sphere of legal practice within England and Wales, from large corporate law firms to local authorities. They have made enormous strides in their professional project since 1998 and have pushed at the open doors of governments keen to drive down costs and open up competition within the legal and related services market.1 Despite this, legal executives remain marginalized at the edge of law. The diversity of their background, the constraining properties of a traditional legal professionalism and the use of their employers’/superordinate profession’s knowledge base confirms their subordinate jurisdictional position and inhibits the capacity for the development of divergent models of legal professionalism.
