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Keynote Address, Regulating Corporate Governance In The Public Interest: The Case Of Systemic Risk, Steven L. Schwarcz
Keynote Address, Regulating Corporate Governance In The Public Interest: The Case Of Systemic Risk, Steven L. Schwarcz
Faculty Scholarship
There’s long been a debate whether corporate governance law should require some duty to the public. The accepted wisdom is not to require such a duty—that corporate profit maximization provides jobs and other public benefits that exceed any harm. This is especially true, the argument goes, because imposing specific regulatory requirements and making certain actions illegal or tortious can mitigate the harm without unduly impairing corporate wealth production. Whether that is true in other contexts, this paper—delivered as the keynote address at the June 2016 National Business Law Scholars Conference at The University of Chicago Law School—questions if it’s true …
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 …