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...

The impact of technology on individual economic sectors has also reached the service industry. This article offers a discussion on the influence of information technologies (IT)and changes taking place as a result of the legal services market digital transformation.Thanks to the results of the...

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...

This paper estimates the effects of several American law firms' international networks of offices on the total value of overseas mergers and acquisitions (M&A) by US corporations. Nowadays many nations can review proposed mergers and US law firms help clients overcome such regulatory hurdles,...

This Article describes the Movement Lawyering Lab at the University of Denver Sturm College of Law. The Movement Lawyering Lab is an experiential course that exposes students to the philosophy of movement lawyering and provides an opportunity for students to partner directly with national and...

Court and litigation operations are opaque in the best of times, and the lack of detailed records from the Nineteenth Century makes it even more difficult to learn how lawyers and judges went about their business. This may be one of the reasons why there are very few accounts of the nuts and...

Women have become increasingly visible as leading advocates for social causes in a male-dominated profession. Their advancement in a specialized and often risky law practice illustrates a general process by which lawyers establish themselves as influential interpreters of law, enabling them to...

Due in part to the COVID-19 pandemic, enhancements in technology, as well as shifts in the macroeconomic and socioeconomic dynamics of globalization, Digital Transformation (DT) has become an enterprise-wide imperative for most multinational companies (MNCs). As such, legal departments are being...

Firms face a greater risk of lawsuits for overstated rather than understated earnings or net assets, suggesting conservatism can reduce firms’ expected legal costs. Because managers with legal expertise are more likely than other managers to recognize the legal benefits of conservatism, this...

This article considers whether the demand for legal advice about potential liability for future acts is socially excessive. using the standard model of accidents, we find that the answer depends on the type of advice and the form of liability. When advice provides information about properly...

What is the role of firms and markets in mediating the division of labor? This paper uses confidential microdata from the Census of Services to examine law firms' boundaries. We find that firms' field scope narrows as market size increases and individuals specialize, indicating that firms'...

The goal of this paper is to explore the possibility that the costs and benefits of legal representation are structured so that each individual party seeks legal representation in the hope of exploiting the other party, while knowing full well that failing to do so will open up the possibility...

Competition Law is mainly concerned with promoting consumer welfare. Competition Law aims at encouraging competition by prohibiting anti-competitive trade practices. The Competition and Fair-Trading Act prohibits certain horizontal practices i.e., certain arrangements or agreements between firms...

Lawyers commonly make threats that would be subject to sanction outside the institutional structure of lawyering and outside of doctrines such as the litigation privilege. Academic analysis of threats and blackmail largely ignores lawyer threats, implicitly positing the legal system as an...

The law and economics movement has transformed the analysis of private law in the United States and increasingly around the world. As the field developed from 1970 to the early 2000s, scholars have developed countless insights about the operation and effects of law and legal institutions....

In an increasingly competitive and congested job market, this paper examines new career opportunities open to linguistically minded young lawyers. The globalisation of recent decades has led to a soaring demand for the translation of legal documents, inter alia in cross-border financial...

The American Bar Association (ABA) Standing Committee on Ethics and Professional Responsibility recently issued an advisory ethics opinion in which it found that a lawyer has an ethical duty to investigate when a client or prospective client tries to retain a lawyer for a matter that could be...

The unprecedented public health and financial crisis resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic calls upon the legal profession to go beyond traditional, adversarial, “rights”-based representation and disputing force majeure liability, towards working with clients and collaborating with...

This article focuses on counsel's liability exposure when his or her client engages in fraudulent conduct. The article begins by addressing the pertinent ethical rules promulgated by the American Bar Association (ABA). Thereafter, the discussion provides an analysis of the pertinent case law...

This essay examines the ethical dilemmas that emerge from the intersection of morality and our professional obligations as attorneys. It argues that moral decision-making is difficult for similar reasons across professions: (1) We have imperfect knowledge about probabilities; (2) it is...

From the neo-Weberian literature on state-building and the political sociology of the legal profession, one might expect government lawyers to be sheepdogs, nipping at the heels of straying administrators, supplying their agencies with the bureaucratic autonomy so often missing in American...

Scholars and practitioners have looked extensively at patterns of racial inequality in U.S. business law firms. In the corporate bar, pull factors that have long shaped legal professionals’ careers include promotions, outside job offers to move from one firm to another, or family priorities...

At one time, the legal profession largely regulated itself. However, based on the economic notion that increased competition would benefit consumers, jurisdictions have deregulated their legal markets by easing rules relating to attorney advertising, fees, and, most recently, nonlawyer ownership...

Some additional evidence on the comparative effect of income, regulation, and other variables on the demand for lawyers is called for. One objective of this paper is to investigate the speed of adjustment of law schools to shifts in the demand for lawyers. Section I presents a theoretical model...

The article offers a reflection on how applications of computer technology (including data analytics) are and may be taught to (future) lawyers and what are the benefits and limitations of the different approaches. There is a growing sense among legal professionals and law teachers that the...

As the articles in this Colloquium illustrate the role of the corporate lawyer—both as in-house and outside counsel—is instrumental in effectuating ethical lawyering, sound corporate governance practices, and law compliance. Although ethical precepts are plentiful with respect to the...

This empirical study, using quantitative and qualitative techniques, attempts to assess the state of the legal needs of non-profit organizations, with an emphasis on the ways in which non-profit organizations are or are not accessing assistance addressing their legal services needs. While most...

We examine gender gaps in career dynamics in the legal sector using rich panel data from one of the largest global law firms in the world. The law firm studied is representative of multinational law firms and operates in 23 countries. The sample includes countries at different stages of...

In 2006, Christopher Dale leaked information about Clayton Utz's internal investigation into the events surrounding the destruction of documents that would have been relevant and damaging to their client, British American Tobacco, in the 2002 McCabe litigation. This article uses this case study...

IPOs with underwriters that retain an elite law firm exhibit a lower average first-day return. This empirical pattern remains after controlling for an extensive set of proxies associated with existing explanations of IPO initial returns. We rationalize this finding with a pre-IPO pricing model,...

We hypothesize that one way accounting practices spread is through law firm connections. We investigate this prediction by examining companies that avoided reporting compensation expense by engaging in stock option backdating. We hypothesize that executives engaged in backdating because they...

Contract theory largely abstracts from individual differences in the ability to design contracts. We argue that the relative expertise of contracting parties strongly affects contractual outcomes. Using unique data on company acquisition contracts, we document that lawyers with higher expertise...

American law schools face an ever-growing call for more skills training and experiential learning as part of legal education. This call is mirrored by a call for expansion of experiential learning and skills to include those beyond litigation-based writing. Italian law schools tend generally to...

This Article is the first to analyze an unexplored but critical change in how modern banks are governed: the rise of lawyers as bank directors. That rise has been precipitous, raising the question of why lawyer-directors now sit on most bank boards. Using novel empirical evidence, we show that...

This article puts forth processes for preventing disputes based on value innovation, an approach referred to as Cooperative Design Lawyering (CDL). It suggests that law firms could take a competitive edge by offering Cooperative Design Lawyering services. It explores how legal designers can...

A number of lawyers associated with President Donald Trump, within and outside of his administration, have faced ethical challenges. While the ethical issues for President Trump's personal lawyer Michael Cohen have grabbed the most headlines, actions of Acting U.S. Attorney General Matthew...

Lawyers engaged in adoption work often call it “happy law,” and consider adoption – finding a child for yearning parents, finding parents for a needy child – an unmitigated good. That attitude can mask the fact that all adoption begins with loss. One family loses a child so that another...

This Article is the first to make the business case for firms to promote and prioritize lawyer well-being. For more than three decades, quantitative research has demonstrated that lawyers suffer from depression, anxiety, and addiction far in excess of the general population. Since that time,...

Social justice lawyers come to the profession intending to make a difference through the instruments of law. And gloriously, they often make a difference in people's lives for the better. They make our world a more just, compassionate, and tolerant place. But there is no denying that, in poverty...

Prior research has established that leadership characteristics, job equity perception, and client satisfaction are all associated with firm financial performance. This research, under the theoretical frameworks of Upper Echelons Theory, Adams Equity Theory, and Stakeholder Theory, provides...