The Sum of Its Parts: The Lawyer-Client Relationship in Initial Public Offerings

This Article examines the impact of the quality of a lawyer\u27s working relationship with his or her client on one of the most important types of capital markets deal in a company\u27s existence: its initial public offering (IPO). Drawing on data from interviews with equity capital markets lawyers at major law firms, and analyzing data from IPOs in the United States registered with the Securities and Exchange Commission between June 1996 and December 2010, this study finds a strong association between several measures of IPO performance and the familiarity between the lead underwriter and its counsel, as measured by the number of times a particular law firm serves as counsel to a managing underwriter within a relatively short time period. Performance is gauged according to a stock\u27s opening day returns, price performance over thirty, sixty, and ninety trading days, correct price revision, litigation rates, and the speed at which deals are completed. I also analyze the relationships between the lawyers for the lead underwriter and the lawyers for the issuer. The analysis shows some benefits from familiarity, albeit generally smaller than those associated with the underwriter-lawyer relationship. In all cases, the positive effects of repeated interaction diminish the further back in time the previous collaborations occurred. To rule out selection and reverse causality, I perform a number of tests using smaller subsets of the data to remove observations that are plausibly selection driven. I also show that the relationships between familiarity and deal quality occur independently of the level of the lawyers\u27 experience. These findings support the conclusion that lawyers\u27 relational skill can positively influence deal outcomes, independent even of substance and process knowledge. I hypothesize that the core advantage of repeated interaction is the formation of more effective lawyer-client team dynamics

Hyperelliptic Integrals and Mirrors of the Johnson-Koll\'ar del Pezzo Surfaces

For all k>0 integer, we consider the regularised I-function of the family of del Pezzo surfaces of degree 8k+4 in P(2,2k+1,2k+1, 4k+1), first constructed by Johnson and Koll\'ar. We show that this function, which is of hypergeometric type, is a period of an explicit pencil of curves. Thus the pencil is a candidate LG mirror of the family of del Pezzo surfaces. The main feature of these surfaces, which makes the mirror construction especially interesting, is that the anticanonical system is empty: because of this, our mirrors are not covered by any other construction known to us. We discuss connections to the work of Beukers, Cohen and Mellit on hypergeometric functions.Comment: 27 page

GpaXItarl originating from Solanum tarijense is a major resistance locus to Globodera pallida and is localised on chromosome 11 of potato

Resistance to Globodera pallida Rookmaker (Pa3), originating from wild species Solanum tarijense was identified by QTL analysis and can be largely ascribed to one major QTL. GpaXItarl explained 81.3% of the phenotypic variance in the disease test. GpaXItarl is mapped to the long arm of chromosome 11. Another minor QTL explained 5.3% of the phenotypic variance and mapped to the long arm of chromosome 9. Clones containing both QTL showed no lower cyst counts than clones with only GpaXItarl. After Mendelising the phenotypic data, GpaXItarl could be more precisely mapped near markers GP163 and FEN427, thus anchoring GpaXItarl to a region with a known R-gene cluster containing virus and nematode resistance genes