This study introduces deflection as a new form of institutional maintenance that enables established actors in an institutional field to mitigate negative impacts of legitimacy judgments. Deflection may be considered to be a special form of buffering that can appear when the legitimacy judgment and the sentencing decision are discrete events. Specifically, this study presents two propositions to explore the ability of actors to draw upon the influence of their counterparts to engage in the deflection strategy which, in turn, can influence the stability of the population in an institutional field. 897 decisions of the appellant court of the National Organic Program from 2009 until 2012 were analyzed to assess the impact of field level characteristics (trade association membership) and organizational attributes (country of origin, subsidiary status, and revenue) upon the success of deflection strategies. When the characteristics of both the firm facing the court’s decision as well as their certifying agent were considered, it was found that the professional association membership status of the certifying agent significantly related to the outcomes of the court’s ruling.