Study title

Semi-structured interviews with lawyers practising in corporate and finance teams in 30 of the UK's top 100 law firms covering issues including: (a) lawyer-client relationships and the balance of power between lawyers and clients; (b) the nature of their jobs; (c) professional ethics; (d) professional regulation; (e) the influence of the 'public interest' on the work of corporate finance lawyers and the ability for lawyers to challenge client decision-making; and (f) innovation and space for creativity in transaction legal practice.

Recent corporate scandals (collapse of Lehmans, ‘Hackgate’, Barclays/LIBOR, Standard Chartered Bank/Iran etc) bring into sharp focus the power of non-state actors and their capacity to impact on society. Such scandals also raise questions over the extent to which lawyers are or have been involved in corporate wrongdoing and how or if those lawyers can shape and control corporate actors. This three year project seeks to answer those questions and has two, key overarching objectives: (1) to generate a body of socio-legal scholarship on the ability of corporate lawyers to influence corporate decision making, and on how the regulator, the Solicitors Regulation Authority (‘SRA’), manages risks from large law firms; (2) to inform policy and practice in the ways lawyers advise their clients and in the way the SRA manages risks. Following reviews of relevant literatures, data for this project will be gathered through three formats: (1) semi-structured interviews with corporate lawyers in large firms and with in-house lawyers working for large corporates; (2) focus groups with corporate lawyers in large firms; (3) a period of participant observation and semi-structured interviews with members of the ‘Supervision’ team at the SRA.