Search results

The study of cause lawyers has focused heavily on the private sector, but both public and private attorneys bring voting rights litigation. This chapter first situates voting rights litigation within cause lawyering, as described by Scheingold and Sarat. It then suggests criteria for analyzing cause lawyering across public and private sectors and applies them to the attorneys who have done the majority of voting rights litigation for American Indians: The Voting Section of the U.S. Department of Justice's Civil Rights Division and the Voting Rights Project of the American Civil Liberties Union. The chapter suggests that the public and private attorneys are more similar than one might expect in their motivation, relationship to clients, and range of political strategies used. Their organizational practice sites differ greatly, but the dynamics of the public practice site confirm that Voting Section attorneys are cause lawyers.

This chapter investigates attributes of an unexplored actor in the contemporary industrial relations system – plaintiff-side employment attorneys – and the premise that pre-dispute mandatory employment arbitration expands employee access to justice.

It presents data from a novel survey of 1,256 employment plaintiff attorneys and the universe of employment disputes administered by the five largest arbitration providers in the United States.

I report multiple measures indicating employment lawyers hold negative views of arbitration and that arbitration acts as a barrier to employee access to justice: A majority of attorneys say employment arbitration clauses have a positive impact on their willingness to reject a case for representation and a negative impact on their willingness to accept a client under a contingency-fee arrangement, and report negative perceptions of the fairness of outcomes and the adequacy of due process protections in arbitration relative to litigation. Furthermore, attorneys report accepting potential clients covered by arbitration agreements at half the rate of potential clients able to sue in court. Finally, arbitration and litigation filing statistics reveal no evidence that low-income or low-value claimants or claims are accessing the arbitration forum.

Novel data compiled here illuminate the institutional characteristics of plaintiff-side employment lawyers and the arbitration forum. They question the assertion that arbitration is an accessible dispute resolution forum for employment disputes relative to civil litigation.

The Bureau of Economics in the Federal Trade Commission has a three-part role in the Agency and the strength of its functions changed over time depending on the preferences and ideology of the FTC’s leaders, developments in the field of economics, and the tenor of the times. The over-riding current role is to provide well considered, unbiased economic advice regarding antitrust and consumer protection law enforcement cases to the legal staff and the Commission. The second role, which long ago was primary, is to provide reports on investigations of various industries to the public and public officials. This role was more recently called research or “policy R&D”. A third role is to advocate for competition and markets both domestically and internationally. As a practical matter, the provision of economic advice to the FTC and to the legal staff has required that the economists wear “two hats,” helping the legal staff investigate cases and provide evidence to support law enforcement cases while also providing advice to the legal bureaus and to the Commission on which cases to pursue (thus providing “a second set of eyes” to evaluate cases). There is sometimes a tension in those functions because building a case is not the same as evaluating a case. Economists and the Bureau of Economics have provided such services to the FTC for over 100 years proving that a sub-organization can survive while playing roles that sometimes conflict. Such a life is not, however, always easy or fun.

This study investigates whether or not accounting and legal decision-makers at publicly traded US firms exhibit a professional affiliation bias with respect to their selection of business service providers. Executives at NYSE or NASDAQ firms who were affiliated with the accounting profession, the legal profession, or neither profession indicated their likelihood of using one of three randomly assigned types of firms (i.e., a CPA firm, a law firm, or a firm with both CPA and attorney partners) to provide five selected business services. The five business services represent the range of accounting and legal services that firms often outsource: audit, tax representation, mergers and acquisitions, trade regulation/interstate commerce, and litigation. We find that executive level decision-makers at publicly traded US firms do exhibit a professional affiliation bias in the selection of business service providers and that this professional affiliation bias is stronger in attorneys than in CPAs. The fact that all respondents were NYSE or NASDAQ executives, rather than students or another surrogate population, provides additional relevance and generalizability to our findings. Identifying this bias can help executives avoid suboptimal initial selection decisions and/or inaccurate performance evaluations of external business service providers.

The academic literature that addresses the creation and transformation of large law firms seldom mentions the presence of legal secretaries. The absence of legal secretaries, the vast majority of whom are women, reproduces law firm hierarchies in which attorneys are important in understanding the legal profession and law firm dynamics while secretaries remain invisible. Given the lack of secondary literature on legal secretaries, much of this chapter is based upon legal secretaries' responses to a nationwide survey, which I conducted in Spring 2009. Using such data, along with other primary sources, the chapter examines how legal secretaries' roles and work have changed during the past 50 years, how legal secretaries view themselves and their roles in law large law firms, and the material conditions under which legal secretaries work. Moreover, the most significant scholarship on secretaries has depicted the secretary/boss relationship as one of personal and domestic nature – what we might call the “second-wife syndrome.” The chapter explores whether such a description remains accurate and the complicated gender dynamics that exist between legal secretaries and attorneys.

In Spring 2002, Jeff Skilling (the former CEO of Enron Corporation) incredulously testified before lawmakers that he thought Enron was in great shape the day he left and that he knew next to nothing about the off‐balance‐sheet transactions that ultimately brought down his company. As we watched the train derail that day, it became clear that lawmakers convened the hearing not only to assure the public that Congress too was angry, but also to look for a solution to the problem that a CEO didn’t know some pretty important things about his company, its operations and performance, and that the company’s independent auditors appeared compromised and may have acted accordingly.

In the intellectual property (IP) and management literature, the question of how external patent attorneys impact patent filings has been understudied. The purpose of this paper is to advance this area of research by examining how the use of external patent attorneys influences the patent filing strategies of firms and what impact firms’ level of experience with the exclusive use of in-house resources has on filing strategies. This study, thus, provides insights into the strategic dimension behind patent filing, a process which is affected by patent attorneys’ work and decision-making processes.

The econometric analysis is based on a patent database of 922,553 patents which is combined with an EPO patent database covering applications from 1990 to 2010. The authors test the hypotheses for this study using patent indicators addressing the impact of in-house firm experience vs the use of external patent attorneys on firm’s filing strategy.

This research finds empirical evidence that external patent attorneys’ work has an effect on patent scope, international scope, and patenting speed. Moreover, it can be shown that external patent attorneys have a positive impact on most filing dimensions, such as patent scope, international scope and the Patent Cooperation Treaty option, whereas the level of in-house firm experience has a negative impact on most filing dimensions. This implies that external patent attorneys seem to pursue a “maximization approach” while experienced firms seem to pursue a more differentiated approach to filing patents, for instance, drafting narrower and more focused patents.

The study suggests that effective filing strategies require an integrated approach between diverse IP stakeholders. More particularly, filing strategies should be communicated and aligned between all actors, including external patent attorneys in order to achieve the targeted patenting output.

The current study develops a patent filing typology, which accounts for patent attorneys’ decision options. In providing insights into patent attorneys’ work and their impacts on intellectual property rights management, the study is a useful complement to prior research, which has predominantly focused on applicants or examiners.

This paper seeks to describe and assess recent legal developments that affect the corporate attorney‐client privilege.

Discusses and analyzes the corporate attorney‐client privilege and work product doctrine and the role of such protections in US society; discusses how recent developments including policies of the US Department of Justice and the evolving role of corporate auditors have adversely affected these protections, and shows how some of these developments can be ameliorated so as to preserve the important principles underlying the corporate attorney‐client privilege.

The upsurge of investigations into alleged corporate criminality has reignited the debate over the value of the privilege and the ability to have confidential communications between corporations and clients. Although judicial decisions do not favor adoption of a “selective waiver” doctrine, concerns have also been raised that legislative adoption of a selective waiver in this current culture‐of‐waiver environment may practically prevent companies from ever being able to assert a privilege again in governmental investigations.

A useful update on developments affecting the attorney‐client privilege and work product doctrine from a lawyer who specializes in securities litigation and governmental enforcement and is a member of the New York State Bar Association Task Force on the Attorney Client Privilege as well as Liaison from the Corporate Counsel Consortium to the American Bar Association Task Force on the Attorney Client Privilege.

This study examines how transformational leadership on the part of senior attorneys in law firms may affect their subordinate attorneys' performance in an industry experiencing both distinctive leadership challenges and widespread economic upheaval. Specifically, our multilevel theoretical model attempts to capture the moderated mediation relationships between transformational leadership, innovative climate, entrepreneurial orientation, and individual performance.

The study employs of a multilevel path analysis to examine the earlier described conceptual model utilizing primary data collected from 484 attorneys at 31 professional service firms.

The authors used multilevel path analysis to examine the existence and the extent of a multilevel mediation effect. They found that a firm's entrepreneurial orientation mediates the relationship between supervising attorneys' transformational leadership and individual attorneys' performances. The authors also found that the indirect effect of supervising attorneys' transformational leadership on individual attorneys' performances through entrepreneurial orientation is conditional on the degree of firm innovative climate.

The authors draw on theories of social learning to construct a dual-level theoretical model that connects domains within the leadership and entrepreneurship literatures. It does so by examining the relationships between the law firms' supervising attorneys' change-oriented leadership and their subordinate attorneys' billable hours during a period of severe economic disruption.

‘Even in the very few instances where the accused has intrusted his defender with a full confession of his crime, we hold it to be clear that he may still be lawfully defended. The guilt of which he may be conscious, and which he may have so disclosed, he has still a right to see distinctly proved upon him by legal evidence … Human beings are never to be run down like beasts of prey, without respect to the laws of the chase.’