Expungement of Lawyer Disciplinary Records: Evidence from Florida

Abstract

I study the effects of expunging lawyers’ professional disciplinary records. To do so, I exploit the rollout of a 2007 policy that posts disciplinary records of Florida lawyers to their official online profiles but automatically removes them after 10 years. The policy only wipes clean the records of 65 percent of disciplined lawyers because the others have been disbarred before they qualify for expungement. Lawyers who have their records expunged are 9 times more likely to offend after expungement than lawyers with a clean record, but the expungement itself has no causal effect on whether lawyers subsequently reoffend.