Legal and Regulatory Entrepreneurship: A Review of Organizational Tactics and Their Consequences for Organizations and the Law

Contemporary organizational activities are increasingly intertwined with legal considerations. Research across multiple disciplines suggests that organizations do not merely comply with the law, but engage in “legal and regulatory entrepreneurship,” wherein they strategically exploit the law to secure advantages. Such organizational actions are significant because they impact not only firm-level outcomes but also the broader legal landscape by influencing legislation, legal precedents, or interpretations of compliance. Yet, existing research in this domain remains fragmented across diverse paradigms and disciplines, hindering systematic scholarly inquiry. In this review—drawing on 509 publications and working papers from management, sociology, law, economics, and political science—we identify 10 primary organizational tactics of legal and regulatory entrepreneurship. We then describe how organizations use each tactic, and present the key conditions that enable their use. Next, we place these tactics within a framework of intended targets—legislative, regulatory, and judicial authorities—and articulate the specific responses they elicit. This emergent framework demonstrates how organizational legal and regulatory entrepreneurship can affect the acting organizations and ultimately reshape the law itself, thereby generating broader economic and legal consequences.