The Oxford Handbook of Law and Management

Abstract

This handbook introduces the Law & Management approach, an emerging academic discipline that examines how organizations leverage legal resources to achieve competitive advantages and enhance performance. Unlike traditional legal analysis or law and economics, this approach focuses on how firms differentially utilize legal instruments and their mastery of the law itself within the same regulatory environment to improve their position. The discipline encompasses both descriptive analysis of the role of legal resources in organizational success and pragmatic recommendations for effective legal strategy implementation. Law & Management diverges from conventional legal scholarship by viewing law instrumentally rather than normatively, emphasizing how firms actively shape and deploy legal resources rather than passively comply with regulations. The approach particularly highlights the importance of lower-level norms in Kelsen’s hierarchy, including corporate-generated rules and soft law. Methodologically, it employs empirical analyses of legal practice, comparative studies, and qualitative research to understand how organizations’ legal choices impact their performance. The field has developed distinct concepts such as legal performance, competitive legal advantage, and legal astuteness to describe organizational capabilities in legal resource utilization. While primarily relevant to corporate legal departments and business law firms, the approach increasingly interests policymakers, judges, and academics. This realist perspective acknowledges the strategic use of legal instruments while maintaining analytical rather than prescriptive objectives, contributing to the understanding of how legal expertise drives organizational success.