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CERLP | Albert Yoon: Determinants of Attorney Misconduct
Law Building (LAW), LAW 3500
401 East Peltason Drive, Irvine , CA 92697, United States
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Abstract
Lawyers are required to follow the rules of professional conduct within their jurisdiction. These rules govern their obligations to clients, judges, other lawyers, and the public. A small fraction of lawyers attract the attention of regulators, who investigate and impose discipline. Given their role in our increasingly interconnected society, an important question that emerges is what factors, if any, explain which lawyers are investigated and disciplined? Using data from the State Bar of California, we examine the universe of lawyers admitted to practice in the state during the period 1990 to 2023. This data provides a rich array of anonymized individual-level information: law school education, bar performance, demographic characteristics, and any investigation and/or discipline. We find that lawyers with the highest rates of investigation and discipline are drawn disproportionately from graduates from less selective law schools and those receiving low passing scores on the state bar exam. Gender and ethnicity are also strong predictors. The data also suggest, however, that these factors alone provide an incomplete, and likely misleading, narrative of attorney misconduct. We argue that the existing regulatory framework is largely reactive and could benefit from a more evidence-based approach. More promising, we posit, is for regulators to proactively identify lawyers at high risk of discipline and provide them with training and resources to avoid the most common forms of attorney misconduct.
About Albert Yoon
Albert Yoon holds the University of Toronto Faculty of Law Michael J. Trebilcock Chair in Law and Economics.
Professor Yoon received his undergraduate degree from Yale and his law and doctoral (political science) degrees from Stanford. During law school, he was the senior articles editor of the Stanford Law Review. After graduation, he clerked for the Hon. R. Guy Cole of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit. Before joining the Faculty of Law, he was professor of law at Northwestern University. At the Faculty of Law, he was Associate Dean - Research and Curriculum for the 2018-20 academic years. In 2022 he became a Pierre Elliot Trudeau Fellow and previously has has held fellowships at Princeton University and the Robert Wood Johnson and Russell Sage foundations. In 2023 he was the George Francis Brownell Visiting Professor of Law at Harvard Law School.
Professor Yoon examines labor markets within and outside the legal profession. He has published in the Chicago, Stanford, and Virginia law reviews; and the Annals of Applied Statistics, Journal of Law & Economics, Journal of Theoretical Politics, among others. He is a recipient of the Ronald H. Coase Prize for best article in Law and Economics and a member of the American Law Institute. His recent scholarship focuses on legal ethics, and applications of machine learning and natural language processing to law.
In addition to his academic career, Professor Yoon is a co-founder of Blue J, a start-up using AI to help tax and legal professionals.