Determinants of Attorney Misconduct: A Study of California Lawyers

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.

Albert Yoon holds the Michael J. Trebilcock Chair in Law and Economics at the University of Toronto. He received his B.A. from Yale and his J.D. and PhD. from Stanford before clerking on the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit. Albert’s research has appeared in leading publications such as the Stanford Law Review, the Chicago Law Review and the Journal of Law & Economics. In 2023, Albert was the George Francis Brownell Visiting Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. His recent scholarship focuses on legal ethics, and applications of machine learning and natural language processing to law.

Panelist: Simon Young, Ian Davies Professor in Ethics, The University of Hong Kong Faculty of Law

Moderator: Benjamin Chen, Associate Professor & Director of Law and Technology Centre, The University of Hong Kong Faculty of Law