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Full-Text Articles in Law
Agency Costs In Law-Firm Selection: Are Companies Under-Spending On Counsel?, Elisabeth De Fontenay
Agency Costs In Law-Firm Selection: Are Companies Under-Spending On Counsel?, Elisabeth De Fontenay
Faculty Scholarship
A growing body of literature examines whether corporate clients derive sufficient value from the law firms that they engage. Yet little attention has been paid to whether clients optimally select among law firms in the first place. One entry-point is to identify discrepancies in the quality of counsel selected by different corporate clients for the very same work. Using a large sample of loans, this Article finds that major U.S. public companies select lower-ranked law firms for their financing transactions than do private equity-owned companies, controlling for various deal characteristics. While some of this discrepancy can be attributed to value-maximizing …
Law Firm Selection And The Value Of Transactional Lawyering, Elisabeth De Fontenay
Law Firm Selection And The Value Of Transactional Lawyering, Elisabeth De Fontenay
Faculty Scholarship
Following the contraction in demand for law firms’ services during the Great Recession, “Big Law” was widely diagnosed as suffering from several maladies that would spell its ultimate demise, including excessive fees, excessive size, increased competition from in-house counsel, the commoditization of legal work, and the decline in demand for “relationship firms.” While each of these market pressures is only too real for certain segments of the law-firm population, their threat to the most elite U.S. law firms has been largely misunderstood. Even as many firms reduce their fees and contract in size, we should expect certain firms to continue …