The conference is over but the scholarship lives on. This is one of a series of posts highlighting several KCON XII presenters who graciously provided me with abstracts or summaries of their presentations.

Assessing the Assessment: B Lab’s Effort to Measure Companies’ Benevolence, Seattle University Law Review, Vol. 40, No. 1, 2017

Michael B. Dorff, Southwestern University School of Law

For benefit corporations to persuade their various audiences that they are as beneficial for society as they claim, they need reliable assessments of their social performance. Even if assessments were not required by most states’ benefit corporation statutes, it is difficult to imagine the benefit corporation form could gain credibility without them. Creating measurement tools for these assessments poses the twin challenges of balancing simplicity against validity and weighing vision against inclusiveness. This article examines how B Lab’s popular assessment tool engages these challenges.

SSRN link:  https://ssrn.com/abstract=2911302