Hiding Lawyer Misconduct: Evidence From Florida

Abstract

I study the effects of hiding lawyers' professional disciplinary records. To do so, I exploit the rollout of a 2007 policy that posts disciplinary records of Florida lawyers to their official online profiles but automatically removes them after 10 years. The policy only hides the online records of 65% of disciplined lawyers because the others have been disbarred before they qualify for removal. Lawyers who have their records hidden are 10 times more likely to offend after removal than lawyers with a clean record, but the removal itself has no causal effect on whether lawyers subsequently reoffend.