Does the Quality of the Plaintiffs' Law Firm Matter in Deal Litigation?

future may see the economic organism, now typified by the corporation, not only on an equal plane with the state, but possibly even superseding it as the dominant form of social organization. The law of corporations, accordingly, might well be considered as a potential constitutional law for the new economic state, while business practice is increasingly assuming the aspect of economic statesmanship. Adolf Berle Jr. & Gardiner Means1I. IntroductionCorporate has become a constant fixture of the academic and policy debates of our time.2 It not only figured prominently in the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 and the Dodd-Frank Act of 2010, the sweeping regulatory reforms of the last decades, but its reach has been far broader at both domestic and international levels.3 For a vast array of economic and social problems-from economic development and systemic risk to rising inequality-corporate reform has surfaced as a favored policy response.4 As evidence of its popularity in academic circles, by 2015 there were over 11,000 papers on the website of the Social Sciences Research Network (SSRN) that make explicit reference to governance in their title or abstract, up from about 3500 in 2006.5Yet despite its extensive usage, there is no canonical definition of what corporate means.6 At one extreme, corporate is viewed as [a]nything and everything that influences the way that a corporation is actually run.7 This would encompass external constraints on corporate behavior (such as those provided by credit markets, competition, and the market for corporate control), as well as internal ones.8 Most works on corporate governance, however, focus primarily on internal governance, which relates to the balance of power among shareholders, boards of directors, and managers.9 And most policy efforts in corporate since the 1970s have emphasized variations on the same formula-the independence of corporate directors, on the one hand, and the empowerment of shareholders, on the other-to address very different problems over time.Such overt emphasis on corporate is relatively new. As depicted in Figure 1, the very expression corporate did not exist in the English language until the 1970s, but its use has exploded since.10To be sure, such growing usage in part merely reflects the advent of new terminology-with governance providing a different vocabulary to describe otherwise familiar themes.12 Nevertheless, the very appearance of this neologism is likely not fortuitous, but rather indicative of a new mindset: one that assumes that the particular balance of power, organizational structure, and decision-making processes within the corporation matter deeply for economic and social life. What, then, explains this growing interest in corporate governance?Even though the rise in prominence of corporate is well documented,13 the driving forces behind it have not yet received systematic attention. There is, however, an important literature offering different accounts about the degree and direction of corporate change in the last few decades. For instance, Ronald Gilson ascribes the transformation of U.S. corporate in the last decades of the 20th century to changes in the operation of product and capital markets.14 Jeffrey Gordon, in turn, attributes the rise of independent directors in the United States to the greater informational content of stock market prices-which, he argued, made it possible for outsiders to monitor the pursuit of shareholder value by corporate management.15 There is also an established connection between calls for greater shareholder involvement in corporate and the drastic expansion of institutional (in lieu of individual) ownership of corporate stock since the mid-20th century.16 Relatedly, Martin Gelter has argued that the gradual shift in pension systems from defined benefit to defined contribution plans has tied the fortune of workers to the performance of stock markets, hence increasing popular interest in corporate and legitimizing the pursuit of shareholder wealth maximization. …