We examine a routine and timely disclosure, earnings press releases, to determine the extent to which several novel qualitative elements of such disclosures are associated with changes in sell‐side financial analysts' information environment. Using a comprehensive set of GARCH‐based (generalized autoregressive conditional heteroscedasticity) proxies, we examine how disclosure readability's components, across‐document textual similarity, and within‐document lexical diversity alter analysts' information environment. We find that readability in the form of shorter sentences, textual similarity, and lexical diversity are strongly related to decreases in analysts' uncertainty. Further, shorter sentences and lexical diversity improve both public and private information precision, whereas similarity affects solely analysts' private information precision. While the GARCH ‐based proxies allow us to alleviate concerns regarding potentially spurious inferences (Sheng and Thevenot 2012), we note as a caveat that such an estimation restricts our inferences to large, stable, and heavily followed firms. These findings should be of interest to analysts who may wish to explore the latent information contained within the qualitative elements of disclosure, regulators who direct the form and content of disclosure, and academics who study the use (and possible misuse) of various forms of information and its presentation.

We identify forward-looking statements (FLS) in firms’ disclosures to distinguish between “forecast-like” (quantitative statements about earnings) and “other”, or non-forecast-like, FLS. We show that, like earnings forecasts, other FLS generate significant investor and analyst responses. Unlike earnings forecasts, other FLS are issued more frequently when uncertainty is higher. We then show that earnings-related FLS are more sensitive to uncertainty than quantitative statements, suggesting that managers are more likely to alter the content than the form of FLS when uncertainty is higher. Our study indicates that incorporating other FLS into empirical measures provides a more comprehensive proxy for firms’ voluntary disclosures.

We examine whether securities lawyers involved in SEC comment letter inquiries act as client advocates by resisting disclosure changes or as gatekeepers by encouraging disclosure transparency. Consistent with an advocacy role, we find that securities lawyers' involvement in SEC comment letters is associated with resisting disclosure inquiries through redacting information from filings and issuing fewer amendments to previous disclosures. Our evidence also supports the view that the role of securities lawyers extends beyond the specific inquiry; their involvement is associated with improved readability and more cautionary language in the subsequent 10-K, and fewer future restatements and comment letters. Last, we find that securities lawyers serve more of an advocacy role when proprietary costs are high and when the inquiry involves a possible amendment, but more of a gatekeeper role when an inquiry is more complex.