3 ms·

Unfortunately I don’t have any good citations just IRL lawyer friends. Should be easy to google the rules though. IANAL but The rule is basically that law firms

Unfortunately I don’t have any good citations just IRL lawyer friends. Should be easy to google the rules though. IANAL but The rule is basically that law firms can only be owned by lawyers. The idea being (i think) that lawyers have a legal responsibility to their clients and that’s be corrupted via existence of shareholders (or, shareholders without legal responsibility too). Regarding your theory, I think it’s bunk. There has been a consistent trend to centralized big companies throughout American capitalism long before the 80s. Just look at the history of GE. In fact, the growth of index funds actually indicates a shift away from big corps (or at least big corps with disparate business groups) because investors can pick and choose markets better without relying on conglomerates to do that for them. But it should be obvious that massive urban centers are not due to US laws… because we have 1k+ years of cities before that with good documentation of life and laws in those cities.

dragonwriter 5y ago
The “general" rule here is Rule 5.4 of the ABA model rules [0], though the actual rules in a particular jurisdiction (state) may be different since the model rules are not the actual rules of any State. Note that this doesn't actually prohibit any particular structure (well, implicitly it prohibits publicly traded corporations), it just prohibits non-lawyers from being stockholders (if a corp) or partners in a law firm or (except as part of an employee compensation within a law firm) having a claim on revenue generated by lawyers through the practice of law. [0] https://www.americanbar.org/groups/professional_responsibility/publications/model_rules_of_professional_conduct/rule_5_4_professional_independence_of_a_lawyer/ https://www.americanbar.org/groups/professional_responsibili...

dragonwriter 5y ago

The “general" rule here is Rule 5.4 of the ABA model rules [0], though the actual rules in a particular jurisdiction (state) may be different since the model rules are not the actual rules of any State. Note that this doesn't actually prohibit any particular structure (well, implicitly it prohibits publicly traded corporations), it just prohibits non-lawyers from being stockholders (if a corp) or partners in a law firm or (except as part of an employee compensation within a law firm) having a claim on revenue generated by lawyers through the practice of law. [0] https://www.americanbar.org/groups/professional_responsibility/publications/model_rules_of_professional_conduct/rule_5_4_professional_independence_of_a_lawyer/ https://www.americanbar.org/groups/professional_responsibili...