White-Collar Crime Defense Knowledge: Predictors of Lawyer Fame

Abstract

The white-collar crime attorney is a lawyer who is competent in general legal principles and in the substantive and procedural aspects of the law related to upper-class financial crime. Based on a sample of 310 convicted white-collar criminals and their defense lawyers, this paper presents results from statistical analysis of relationships between crime characteristics and defense characteristics to predict lawyer fame. Statistical regression analysis was applied to the sample, where amount of crime money and years in prison represent crime characteristics, while number of client cases and lawyer income represent defense characteristics. Ninety-one percent of the variation in attorney fame is explained by these four independent variables.