Legal Entrepreneurship and the Institutional Approaches to Law & Management

Abstract

This chapter discusses institutional approaches to Law & Management: work that addresses legal strategy from the vantage of the law’s institutional features rather than its substantive corpus. The chapter provides an overview of the Law & Management literature generally, as well as a discussion of work that has taken an institutional approach to legal strategy. The chapter discusses institutional theory, and then goes on to consider at some length the construct of legal entrepreneurship, developed by the author, as an example of an institutionally grounded construct resulting from the combination of empirical and theoretical work in legal strategy. Finally, the chapter considers how legal entrepreneurship relates to—and is distinguishable from—the notion of institutional entrepreneurship. The distinction between these two forms of entrepreneurship has significant implications for a firm’s legal strategy and suggests one of many possible areas for future research in the field of Law & Management.