When Do Professionals Aggressively Pursue Client Interests? The Influence of Identity

Professionals serve multiple competing interests, including those of their clients, the state, and the professional service firms for which they work. Using the lens of identity, we explore when patent lawyers are more likely to aggressively pursue securing broadly scoped patents on behalf of their clients by concealing known prior art during the patent application process. We find that patent lawyers are more likely to do so when representing clients with whom they are highly embedded and who are associated with the lawyers’ dominant market identities. Such an aggressive stance toward the interests of such clients is particularly pronounced when patent lawyers entered their legal careers through the regulatory ‘revolving door’; prior experience as government patent examiners provides lawyers tacit perspective from the other side of the fence that enables them to strongly pursue the interests of clients with whom they strongly identify. In contrast, we find that lawyers employed by high-status law firms t...