You Had Me At Hello or Let Them Go? : Law Firm Selection, Retention, and Defection in the Investment Banking Industry

Drawing upon the theoretical concepts of reputation and social networking, this article\u27s main objective is to assess how investment banks choose external law firms. Using qualitative methods, I show that investment banks, to varying degrees, rely on internal counsel, procurement specialists, and boards of directors to decide which firm to select. When choosing a specific law firm for the first time, corporate decision-makers are likely to evaluate law firms based on intangible factors like reputation and the word-of-mouth referrals of their colleagues. In subsequent selections of a law firm, these factors are transplanted by past results. Firm expertise and cost considerations impact procurement decisions regardless of whether a law firm has been previously retained. Despite claiming that the individual lawyers providing the service is a more important selection criterion than the firm that employs those lawyers, investment banks seem to experience a degree of embeddedness that keeps them using the same firms time after time

Search for dark matter produced in association with bottom or top quarks in √s = 13 TeV pp collisions with the ATLAS detector

A search for weakly interacting massive particle dark matter produced in association with bottom or top quarks is presented. Final states containing third-generation quarks and miss- ing transverse momentum are considered. The analysis uses 36.1 fb−1 of proton–proton collision data recorded by the ATLAS experiment at √s = 13 TeV in 2015 and 2016. No significant excess of events above the estimated backgrounds is observed. The results are in- terpreted in the framework of simplified models of spin-0 dark-matter mediators. For colour- neutral spin-0 mediators produced in association with top quarks and decaying into a pair of dark-matter particles, mediator masses below 50 GeV are excluded assuming a dark-matter candidate mass of 1 GeV and unitary couplings. For scalar and pseudoscalar mediators produced in association with bottom quarks, the search sets limits on the production cross- section of 300 times the predicted rate for mediators with masses between 10 and 50 GeV and assuming a dark-matter mass of 1 GeV and unitary coupling. Constraints on colour- charged scalar simplified models are also presented. Assuming a dark-matter particle mass of 35 GeV, mediator particles with mass below 1.1 TeV are excluded for couplings yielding a dark-matter relic density consistent with measurements