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LEGAL INDICATORS IN TRANSNATIONAL LAW PRACTICE: A METHODOLOGICAL ASSESSMENT
Scholarly Journal
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ABSTRACT: With metrics and analytics spreading into every profession and discipline, evidence-based decision-making is on the rise. Legal practice is also concerned by this trend, as reflected in the growing use of quantitative data by law firms with respect to their corporate clients. Based on the examination of the potential uses of legal indicators in an evidence-based approach to transnational law practice, this article argues that indicators can provide lawyers operating in a transnational context with a relevant source of evidence to move towards a quantitatively informed practice of law. While most academic literature on legal indicators focuses on their governance effects, writings on evidence-based law have not yet investigated the contribution that indicators can make to law practice. This article aims to bridge this gap. It provides a methodological assessment of eight maj or business law indicators and illustrates four potential applications: (1) ranking and benchmarking, (2) screening, (3) measuring legal risk, and (4) supporting litigation. The article concludes that transnational lawyers should employ transnational legal indicators on a daily basis as an opportunity to reengineer legal practice along the lines of the management culture in which transnational firms now live in. Transnational firms operate today in a context with two salient features: first, a fierce regulatory competition between state legal systems in many fields of business law1 and, second, a growing expectation that business decisions should be informed by robust-preferably quantitative-evidence.2 Both circumstances herald new challenges for legal practitioners, who are increasingly expected to get acquainted with mathematical and managerial reasoning.3 Indeed, on the one hand, regulatory competition means that transnational firms are interested in knowing where compliance requirements and taxes are least burdensome, which jurisdiction is best for financing or filing insolvency proceedings, and what governing law or jurisdiction is most favorable to them in an international...