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People rarely keep resolutions, much less ones they don’t make for themselves, but here are some you may want to try.

  1. Post information about the law and current events that lay people can understand on social media. You don’t need to be a TikTok lawyer and dance around, but there’s so much misinformation out there by “influencers” that lawyers almost have a responsibility to correct the record.
  2. Embrace legal tech. Change is scary for most lawyers, but we need to get with the times, and you can start off in areas such as legal research, case management, accounting, billing, document automation and storage, document management, E-discovery, practice management, legal chatbots, automaton of legal workflow, contract management, artificial intelligence, and cloud-based applications. Remember, lawyers have an ethical duty of technological competence.
  3. Learn about legal issues related to the metaverse such as data privacy and IP challenges.
  4. Do a data security audit and ensure you understand where your and your clients’ data is and how it’s being transmitted, stored, and destroyed. Lawyers have access to valuable confidential information and hackers know that. Lawyers also have ethical obligations to safeguard that information. Are you communicating with clients on WhatsApp

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Can “hypermaterial” public information about a stock render the company’s (once material) nonpublic internal data immaterial? Consider the following scenario involving social-media-driven trading in a meme stock:

XYZ Corporation’s stock price had been falling over the last month (from a high of $12 down to $10), due to a short-sale attack by a small group of hedge funds. In the past week, a group of individuals in a social media chatroom have attempted a now well-publicized short squeeze, motivated by a desire to punish what they view as predatory behavior by the hedge funds. As a result, the stock price has been driven up to $300, significantly above where the stock was trading before the short-sale attack. The company’s nonpublic data (earnings, etc.) that will be reported next week reflects the “true” price of the company’s shares should be $8. With knowledge of the above public and nonpblic information, XYZ and some of its insiders issue/sell XYZ shares.

Has XYZ and its insiders committed insider trading in violation of the antifraud provisions of Section 10(b) of the Securities Exchange Act?

Insider trading liability arises under the classical theory when the issuer, its employee, or an affiliate seeks to benefit from…

Professor Martin Edwards (Belmont University College of Law) and I are excited to moderate a discussion group titled, “A Very Online Economy: Meme Trading, Bitcoin, and the Crisis of Trust and Value(s)—How Should the Law Respond,” at the 2022 American Association of Law Schools Annual Meeting. The discussion group is scheduled to take place (virtually) on Friday, January 7, 2022. We welcome responses to the call for participation (here). Here’s the description:

Emergent forces emanating from social and financial technologies are challenging many underlying assumptions about the workings of markets, the nature of firms, and our social relationship with our economic institutions. The 21st century economy and financial architecture are built on faith and trust in centralized institutions. Perhaps it is not surprising that in 2008, a time where that faith and trust waned, a different architecture called “blockchain” emerged. It promised “trustless” exchange, verifiable intermediation, and “decentralization” of value transfer.

In 2021, the financial architecture and its institutions suffered a broadside from socialmedia-fueled “meme” and “expressive” traders. It may not be a coincidence that many of these traders reached adulthood around 2008, when the crisis called into question whether that real money, those real securities, or that…

I’ve addressed the recent social-media-driven retail trading in stocks like GameStop in prior posts (here and here). In both posts, I focused on evidence that at least some of this trading seems to pursue goals other than (or in addition to) profit. For example, some of these retail traders claim that they are buying and holding stocks as a form of social, political, or aesthetic expression. My coauthors Jeremy Kidd, George Mocsary, and I recently posted a forthcoming article on this subject, Social Media, Securities Markets, and the Phenomenon of Expressive Trading, to SSRN. The article introduces the emerging phenomenon of expressive trading. It considers some of the challenges and risks expressive trading may pose to issuers, markets, and regulators–as well as to our traditional understanding of market functioning. Ultimately, the article concludes that while innovations like expressive trading “can be disruptive and demand a reimagining of the established order,” market participants, issuers, and regulators would be wise to pause and observe before rushing to adopt defensive strategies or implement reforms. Here’s the abstract:

Commentators have likened the recent surge in social-media-driven (SMD) retail trading in securities such as GameStop to a roller coaster: “You…