Self-regulation of the legal profession and quality in the market for legal services: an economic analysis of lawyers’ reputation

Camille Chaserant () and Sophie Harnay ()

European Journal of Law and Economics, 2015, vol. 39, issue 2, 449 pages

Abstract: Our article intends to show that self-regulation of the legal profession helps to regulate the quality of legal services in a market characterized by strong information asymmetries. Our model highlights the role of the collective reputation of the profession jointly with the individual reputation of lawyers to sustain high quality. It shows that a high-quality steady state exists in a market for legal services and that the likelihood of high quality increases when the market is self-regulated by the legal profession as compared with the situation where there is no self-regulation. Moreover, the profession has an incentive to maintain a good collective reputation as this increases the clients’ willingness to pay for legal services and, therefore, the rent that accrues to lawyers as a whole. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media New York 2015

Keywords: Self-regulation; Collective reputation; Individual reputation; Legal services; K2; L14; L15; L44; L51; L84 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s10657-013-9420-1 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
Working Paper: Self-regulation of the legal profession and quality in the market for legal services: an economic analysis of lawyers’ reputation (2015)
Working Paper: Self-regulation of the legal profession and quality in the market for legal services: an economic analysis of lawyers’ reputation (2015)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:kap:ejlwec:v:39:y:2015:i:2:p:431-449

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/journal/10657

DOI: 10.1007/s10657-013-9420-1

Access Statistics for this article

European Journal of Law and Economics is currently edited by Jürgen Georg Backhaus, Giovanni B. Ramello and Alain Marciano

More articles in European Journal of Law and Economics from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().