One theme of Randy Picker’s work was to delve into the details of the success and failure of firms and industries. Firms like AT&T and IBM were dominant but eventually, famously, gave way to other firms. Randy studied the rise and fall of many firms, and especially tech firms, and then tried to examine the role that law played in their demise.

In the case of these two firms, he painstakingly covered the legal case against AT&T and that firm’s government-induced breakup, and then also studied the government’s hostility to IBM and, again, that firm’s fall from grace. One of Picker’s great strengths was that very little of his work reads like a brief. He was always a bit unsure of causes and effects. A master of the Socratic method in print as well as in the classroom, his questions were at least as compelling as his analyses and conclusions. Where AT&T and IBM are concerned, it is possible that law really mattered. Randy showed this with careful attention to the lives of these firms, to their industries, and then to the possible role that legal attacks and settlements had on the firms. Still, he left us unsure about the role of law because counterfactuals are just that.

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