The Market for Bad Legal Scholarship: William H. Simon's Experiment in Professional Regulation

Specifically, in 2003, he became a litigation consultant and legal ethics expert witness on behalf of plaintiffs who were suing their former lawyers, the civil rights law firm of Leeds Morelli & Brown (LM&B), and he secured the plaintiffs' waiver of confidentiality and permission for him to write about their lawsuits.6 Doing so accorded with his theory that when law professors give legal advice or testify as experts, they should envision their work as an extension of their legal scholarship, meaning that when practicing lawyers would conventionally maintain client confidences, law professors would publicly present and discuss their legal work as if they were debating legal theory in law journals and at academic conferences. The plaintiffs' attorney declined to defend Simon's conduct, and the trial court struck Simon's expert testimony without opposition.18 * The legal positions that Simon had previously endorsed were rejected as a matter of law by the judge and as a matter of fact by the jury, which rendered a verdict for the defendants.19 * As soon as Simon published the article electronically, disinterested academics in the field of legal ethics questioned both the credibility of his article's discussion of the opposing experts and its thesis about how lawyers should practice.20 Thus, the quality of Simon's advocacy as a litigation consultant, the credibility of his expert opinions, and the value of his article as a work of scholarship, all suffered because, in accordance with his theory, he merged his professional and academic roles, ignored the conventional professional norms, and attempted to perform his legal work as if he were engaged in scholarship.