Law Commons^™

Organizational Representation And The Frontiers Of Gatekeeping, William H. Simon

Faculty Scholarship

I spend more than half of my Professional Responsibility (“PR”) survey course discussing issues distinctive to organizational clients. I do so in part to take into account the realities of practice. If we can generalize from John Heinz and Edward Laumann’s Chicago study, about sixty-five percent of lawyering time is devoted to organizational clients. Yet, the PR issues involved in representing organizational clients occupy a comparatively small portion of legal doctrine, casebooks, and scholarship.

Another reason I emphasize organizational clients is that recent developments in this sphere, especially in securities and tax, have great general interest.

After Confidentiality: Rethinking The Professional Responsibilities Of The Business Lawyer, William H. Simon

Faculty Scholarship

Recent business scandals and the regulatory responses to them raise basic questions about the role of the business lawyer. Lawyers were major participants in Enron and in similar controversies over corporate disclosure. Lawyers have also been key players in the corporate tax shelter industry. In both instances, their conduct has prompted federal regulations that repudiate to an unprecedented degree the bar's traditional understanding of its structure and obligations.

The provision of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 mandating "up-the-ladder" reporting by public corporation counsel was the first federal statute in American history to regulate lawyers directly and broadly. The second came …

The Post-Enron Identity Crisis Of The Business Lawyer, William H. Simon

Faculty Scholarship

The practices and institutions of business lawyering are undergoing a reassessment and revision as radical as anything that has occurred since the late nineteenth century, when the modern professional association and the modern corporate law firm were born. The pace of change has intensified,but its directions remain contested. The articles in this colloquium depict a corporate bar torn between competing role conceptions along a variety of dimensions.

Business Lawyers And Value Creation For Clients, Ronald J. Gilson, Robert H. Mnookin

Faculty Scholarship

This Symposium marks an important milestone in legal scholarship and education: The spotlight falls on business lawyers for a change. Ten years ago, when one of us first wrote about what business lawyers really do, no one had devoted much attention to this part of the profession. In his broadside against lawyers, Derek Bok, then President of Harvard University and formerly dean of its law school, reserved his invective for litigators and the litigation process. Business lawyers captured the attention of very few critics; even on the unusual occasion when we were noticed, the criticism was at least funny. If …