The employment share of legal services in the U.S. more than doubled during 1970–1990, in stark contrast to stability during 1850–1970 and after 1990. The relative wage of lawyers and law firm partners also doubled between 1970 and 1990. We argue that this demand shift was driven by...

The employment share of legal services in the US more than doubled during 1970-1990. At the same time, the relative wages of lawyers and law firm partners increased by 60 percent. This demand shift was driven by important legislative and regulatory events. These increased the scope of the law,...

This paper intends to assess the feasibility of introducing a lawyer's monopoly in Kazakhstan. The main purpose of the study is to analyze the current legal provisions of the Republic of Kazakhstan regarding judicial representatives authorized to provide legal assistance on behalf of civil...

This article attempts to develop a L&E analysis of how lawyers use knowledge to interpret new phenomena. This analysis adopts the analytical tools which can be identified in Guido Calabresi’s interdisciplinary approach to law. We will not discuss the content of Calabresi’s theories either on...

Firm emission accounts for a large share of pollution. Based on the sample of 44 countries, this paper studies whether and how firms’ legal environment influences their environmental performance. After presenting new evidence on the positive link between civil law origin and firm environment...

This chapter addresses the roles that individual lawyers may play working in the field of Election Law, while serving as The Campaign Lawyer. There is no single definition or typology: they work on campaigns of all sizes and at local, state, and federal levels; they serve as general counsel for...

The legal ethics of class actions is a mess, with many conflicting answers and lingering, unresolved questions. The culprit is a fundamental lack of agreement regarding the identity of the client, without which it is impossible to consistently resolve concerns about conflicts of interest and...

Patent attorneys are responsible for obtaining patents that bring the highest expected profits for their corporate clients. We investigate the role of patent attorney capability in determining the value of corporate patents. We find that a one standard deviation increase in legal expertise leads...

Artificial intelligence (“AI”) is everywhere. And the recent explosion of new AI technologies and tools has introduced many new terms that you need to know to understand it. The technology fuels virtual assistants, like Apple’s Siri, helps physicians to spot cancer in MRIs and allows your...

We investigate the impact of observability of contracts between a plaintiff and his attorney on both the efficiency of the environmental conflict and the fairness of the resulting outcome from the environmental conflict. By including two specific game-theoretic models (an observable-contract...

Furthering an integrative ethics-as-practice framework, this paper explores the professional practices, self-understanding and ethics of lawyers working in the Germanic legal context. Existing studies of the legal profession often argue that changing conditions in law have led to a...

Early Modern historians have long been fascinated by the mercantile world of the late medieval and early modern periods. The reason for their fascination can be ascribed to the wealth, cosmopolitism, social capital and political clout that many of these merchants (mostly men) projected onto...

Nonlawyers, including court personnel, are typically prohibited from providing legal advice. But definitions of “legal advice” are unnecessarily broad, creating confusion, disadvantaging self-represented litigants, and possibly raising due process concerns. This Essay argues for a narrower,...

Plaintiffs’ lawyers in the United States play a key role in combating corporate fraud. Shareholders who lose money as a result of fraud can file securities class actions to recover their losses, but most shareholders do not have enough money at stake to justify overseeing the cases filed on...

100 lawyers is a lot, especially for a case that never went to trial or saw a dispositive motion filed. Although Twitter v. Musk did not pan out as the corporate trial of the century, the attorney-appearance record it set still merits some moment. Twitter was a strange case across many...

Research on globalization and legal services emphasizes the reputational and economic value arising from global expansion by law firms, among other things. Where this expansion occurs reflects a variety of influences, including the presence of clients needing the sort of sophisticated...

I investigate the labor market outcomes of American lawyers after they are professionally disciplined. To do so, I match employment data for 672k lawyers in 2012 and 2020 to novel data on public disciplinary measures imposed by state licensing bodies since 1990. I use this data to study...

Recent scandals have brought rankings to the forefront of the legal profession. Several of the most prestigious academic institutions have withdrawn from being ranked, citing the problematic nature of the rankings. However, rankings persist for both legal academics and practice, and there is...

This paper considers the institutional dimensions of professionalism and the legal profession’s struggle with the challenges of post- modernity. An aspect of this is the Law Society’s Training Framework Review (TFR) which promises changes to solicitors’ education from ‘cradle to...

We document that the skill of plaintiffs’ law firms, measured by dismissal ratio, strongly predicts the outcomes of securities class action lawsuits. Lawsuits conducted by skilled law firms are more likely to be settled and have larger settlement amounts, while the defendant firms experience...

The American legal profession is at a critical inflection point, one that will likely result in dramatic changes in the ways in which consumers access legal guidance and the manner in which lawyers and others deliver it. Chat-enabled artificial intelligence, algorithmic decision-making,...

The Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 (SOX) entrusted the general counsel (GC) of public companies with overseeing a new system of internal controls and reporting misconduct at their firms. I use a hand-collected dataset tracking the backgrounds of inhouse lawyers to argue that SOX increased the value...

This paper represents the first comprehensive examination of the possible implementation of the Beyond Budgeting concept in a law firm setting. As such, it provides a unique contribution to the literature, filling a significant gap in the current knowledge base and offering valuable insights for...

Housing is one of the areas where it may be most critical for poor people to have access to legal representation in civil cases. We use the roll-out of New York City’s Universal Access to Counsel program (UA) to assess the effects of legal representation on tenant outcomes, using detailed...

We investigate institutional change as the co-occurrence of deinstitutionalization and institutionalization, while accounting for its determinants at multiple levels of analysis to further our understanding of how individual characteristics aggregated at the organizational level and...

This study provides novel evidence that law firms representing issuers have a material impact on economic outcomes in the IPO market. Fixed effects for legal counsel explain a significant portion of the variation in IPO underpricing, comparable to underwriter fixed effects documented in prior...

Each presidential administration faces its own challenges related to the ethics of government officials and lawyers. What distinguished the Trump presidency was the steady stream of news reports that related to controversies involving government lawyers. In examining various controversies, this...

What role do hierarchies play with respect to the organization of production and what determines their structure? We develop an equilibrium model of hierarchical organization, then provide empirical evidence using confidential data on thousands of law offices from the 1992 Census of Services....

Dieses Arbeitspapier behandelt den aktuellen Markt von Legal-Tech-Diensten in Deutschland und die rechtlichen Entwicklungen bezüglich der dort bestehenden Law-Tech-Branche. Ziel ist es dabei, anhand einer systematischen Analyse der beteiligten Marktkräfte, die Attraktivität der...

Since COVID-19 outbreak the legal industry is awash in concepts like legaltech, which are popping up in quite a number. It represents an engrossing fusion of technology, business, and legal expertise that can be applied to both the business of law and the practice of law. Currently, investment...

The purpose of this research is to evaluate the effect of issuing businesses engaging reputed law firms on the extent of underpricing in developing IPO markets. The consequences of involving prestigious lawyers in underpricing IPO businesses are not really understood from a global viewpoint due...

The metaverse is the emerging cyberspace realm were people and entities (and various forms of algorithms and artificial intelligence) will interact, engage in games, sports, and entertainment, buy and sell “real world” and “in the metaverse” goods and services, and otherwise get into...

Many lawyers are drawn to a career in social justice, in part, to help others and, in part, to fulfill their own path to wellness. Advocacy that sustains personal well-being, however, also poses considerable obstacles to well-being. Some of these obstacles are inherent to social justice work but...

This brief paper explores the correlation and potential relationship between the composition of the legal profession and trends in litigation, in Ontario, Canada. Specifically, we ask whether there is a positive correlation between the numbers of lawyers and paralegals licensed to practice in...

Large corporations contribute to wealth and make an important contribution to economies. At the same time, their business operations and products form a serious threat to the rights of large groups of citizens, be it their right to health, to housing, a minimum wage, occupational safety,...

Firm-level productivity differences are big and largely ascribed to ex-ante heterogeneity in the entrepreneurs' growth potential at birth. Where do these ex-ante differences come from, and what can the policy do to encourage the entry of high-growth entrepreneurs? I study empirically and by...