This Article examines the impact of the quality of a lawyer’s working relationship with his or her client on one of the most important types of capital markets deal in a company’s 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’s 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’ experience.

These findings support the conclusion that lawyers’ 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.