This article focuses for the most part on the emerging soft law of corporate governance and presents an effort to analyze effectiveness of this new type of law and of the regulatory approaches based on it in promoting and securing the implementation of highest corporate governance standards, compared to more traditional hard law instruments. Firstly, however, since the author finds that they are still vague legal concepts, the article tries to define the notions of soft and hard law of corporate governance, before it moves further to analyze their effectiveness. After closely analyzing various incentives and disincentives for the targeted companies to accept and implement highest corporate governance standards embodied in legal instruments being the part of hard or the soft law of corporate governance, author concludes that, notwithstanding tendency of soft law instruments gaining on their overall importance for the improvement of corporate governance regimes, for the time being, current regulatory approaches are still rightfully based on hard law instruments, primarily on legislation. Au­thor also makes a point that the two regulatory approaches are converging and that the key issue at the moment is to find the right balance between the legal instruments belonging to one or the other type of law.