Legal Commentary

Lately, I have been noticing the extent to which large law firms aid law professors by enabling free access to their client memoranda on the Internet.  Although I would never rely on the memoranda as ?authority,? they provide succinct and often useful analyses and summaries of incredibly long and detailed pieces of legislation.  (They also can alert profs to new cases, but I think there are other services that perform this function as well).

Case in point:  the Dodd-Frank bill on financial regulation is 2300 pages long.  I was interested in the corporate governance provisions contained within the bill.  In the olden days, I either would have had to read the bill page by page or have a research assistant read it and summarize it.  Now, I can simply type in ?Corporate governance Dodd-Frank Bill? (or some variant - I can't remember the search string any more) and out pops a nifty chart by Gibson Dunn; a number of posts on the Harvard Corporate Governance blog, including this one, which includes links to analyses by several law firms (including another chart by Kirkland & Ellis), cogent analysis of various provisions by Paul Weiss, and excerpts, prepared by Paul Weiss, of all of the relevant statutory language.  And it?s all free. 

Well, not free at all.  It?s just subsidized, in effect, by the firm?s clients, whose fees provide the revenues from which to pay the associates (and partners) who labor over such documents.  Which brings me to my next question: Why would clients willingly subsidize such activity?  Why wouldn?t clients look for firms who charge less but don?t bother assembling charts and 35 page analyses for the rest of the world to view, gratis?

My best guess is that clients tolerate or prefer the memoranda because: (a) they themselves find the memoranda user friendly (although this would not explain why clients are willing to subsidize free reading for everyone else); (b) the memoranda function as a proxy for the firm?s skill or prominence with judges or policymakers, which allows potential clients to make decisions on which firm to hire (I really doubt this ? the memoranda, at best, demonstrate the collective research and analytical skills of the firm?s associates and partners, but not skills such as negotiation and advocacy); or (c) the memoranda serve a broader lobbying purpose, enabling the firm to express the collective views of its clients about various issues. 

Is there an alternative explanation?  Practitioners, do tell!