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...

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...

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'...

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...

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...

All lawyers in private practice must recognize the possibility of opening a summons and seeing their names listed as defendants. Many private practitioners are more concerned about malpractice than professional discipline. The Preface to the Restatement of Law Governing Lawyers captures the...

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...

Based on the analysis of the online profiles of 205 BRI Talent Bank lawyers as accredited by China’s national bar association, this article generates important empirical knowledge about the approaches and processes that a nation state may use in directing the internationalization of the legal...

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...

Katja Langenbucher's outstanding book seeks to address the question of why and in what ways have lawyers been importing economic theories into a legal environment, and how has this shaped scholarly research, judicial and legislative work? Since the financial crisis, corporate or capital markets...

People with disabilities, especially the impoverished among them, have long been the object of legal advocacy. Historically, lawyers acting on behalf of the disabled poor have fashioned litigation strategies to secure basic individual rights and to obtain much needed institutional reforms....

Exploiting a setting in which lead counsel lawyers are selected before the random assignment of bankruptcy judges, we examine if past interactions between lead counsel lawyers and judges influence corporate bankruptcy outcomes. Debtors' counsel who are familiar with the judge speed up the...

To escape the harsh conditions of work in agriculture or food processing plants, many undocumented immigrants turn to entrepreneurship for safer working conditions and better economic prospects. Transactional lawyers often help these entrepreneurs form limited liability companies or worker...

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...

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 study the roll-out of New York City's Universal Access to Counsel program (UA), using detailed address-level housing court data from 2016 to 2019. The program,...

Legal representatives play a prominent role in the Social Security Disability Insurance adjudication process, earning fees totaling $1.2 billion in 2019. Long ubiquitous in appellate hearings, disability representatives--including attorneys and non-attorneys--have begun appearing more frequently...

The Uniform Power of Attorney Act, adopted in 2006, was designed to address the divergence of various states from the original uniform act and to address problems identified by attorneys practicing in the area. One such problem was the refusal of parties to accept powers of attorney—although a...

Against the backdrop of austerity measures and public sector reforms in Ireland, this paper examined legal costs incurred in child welfare proceedings by the State Child and Family Agency - Tusla, using a need-based allocation model. The direct financial costs of engaging with legal services,...

I study the effect of strategic product market considerations on the resource spending decision of plaintiffs in patent lawsuits. I use a unique sample of US patent litigation cases and focus on an important decision of the plaintiffs; their decision to hire external attorneys. I find that...

In this paper, we study attorneys' fees awarded in the largest securities class actions: “mega-settlements.” Consistent with prior work, we find larger fee awards but lower percentages in these cases. We also find that courts are more likely to reject or modify fee requests made in...

Non-executive directors (NEDs) perform a central role in corporate governance, in providing effective challenge to executives. In-house lawyers (IHLs) are central to an organisation's ability to function effectively and within the law. The relationships between the two constituencies is...

Einleitung -- Historischer Einstieg -- Schlüsselrolle der LegalTech-Unternehmen -- Der LegalTech-Markt -- LegalTech für den Staat -- Hindernisse für LegalTech -- Investitionen in LegalTech -- Ausblick auf die Zukunft von LegalTech.

Attorneys in the United States are under increasing pressure to change and adopt practices commonly found in the world of finance and business. Over the past thirty years the bar and legal academics have debated what to do; the focus of this debate has been over changes to MRPC 5.4 to allow...

We examine the value of CEOs with specialized professional skills by focusing on CEOs with law degrees and their effect on corporate litigation. We find that lawyer CEOs are associated with both lower litigation frequency and less severe litigation. This relation is observed for most of nine...

This paper contains a number of terms important for understanding the developments that are taking place in the crypto community. Because change is happening so rapidly, it is extremely difficult to stay current on the terms, concepts and issues relevant to blockchain, cryptoassets, and the...

Crowdfunding is all the rage in conversations about small business finance. Yet, as with many other rapidly developing business innovations, practicing lawyers were, perhaps, secondary players in the development of business models for crowdfunding. The advent of crowdfunding (and crowdfund...

In order to maximise corporate finance, the effective operation of the key functions within is crucial. A strong corporate governance regime ensures that the managements' conduct is kept in check while also monitoring the corporations' strategic decisions. The optimal mix of debt and equity...