In a series of influential papers, Lester Brickman (2003a, 2003b, 2004) has argued that the income and effective hourly rate of tort lawyers using contingent fees has increased by 1400% since 1960 and that the market for contingent fee lawyers is uncompetitive as evidenced by lack of price advertising and uniform pricing across practitioners, cases and time. He also argues that contingent fee l...

Many lawyers have been taught statistics at school or university. The conventional teaching of statistics, particularly in “service courses”, leads to lawyers absorbing a number of fallacies. These include: • probability assessments can only be made on the basis of long runs and repeated experiments • there is a distinction between “legal probability” and “mathematical probability”. What lawyer...

This paper considers how US courts, which regulate the US legal profession, should respond to the perceived excess of lawyers (i.e. to the lack of adequate employment opportunities for lawyers). It begins by summarizing the courts’ regulatory role. It then situates the contemporary flood-of-lawyers problem in the unavailability of well-paid legal work, not in the absence of a need for lawyers’ ...

This paper examines the interest of lawyers as a group in the level of legal complexity, assuming that lawyers prefer the level of legal complexity that maximizes their total income. I focus on aspects of the law that are the same across all cases in a particular legal field, such as the rule determining whether the defendant is liable or guilty, the rules of procedure, and the scope of damages...

The aim of this paper is to indicate and explore some of the possibilities of using agents in today’s and tomorrow’s law offices. The main function of agents is, in general, to support the user. In this case, a lawyer. To be able to support a practicing lawyer, however, not only is insight in daily practice required, but also understanding of practicing lawyers needs and desires. This position ...

Hierarchies allow individuals to leverage their knowledge through others’time. This mechanism increases productivity and ampli…es the impact of skill heterogeneity on earnings inequality. This paper analyzes the earnings and organization of U.S. lawyers and uses an equilibrium model of knowledge hierarchies inspired by Garicano and Rossi-Hansberg (2006) to assess how much lawyers’productivity a...

Using data from a national survey we conducted in 2009 of about 1,500 lawyers and non-lawyers working in China’s legal system, we measure the political values of Chinese lawyers, compare them to various reference populations, and identify some of their sources. We find that, on the whole, Chinese lawyers are strongly inclined toward political reform, attach far greater importance to political r...

Hierarchies allow individuals to leverage their knowledge through others’time. This mechanism increases productivity and ampli…es the impact of skill heterogeneity on earnings inequality. To quantify this e¤ect, we analyze the earnings and organization of U.S. lawyers and use the equilibrium model of knowledge hierarchies in Garicano and Rossi-Hansberg (2006) to assess how much lawyers’producti...