Take Home Message: When lawyers in civil cases improve case outcomes, it often has more to do with their skills navigating complex court procedures and relationships than their knowledge of the law.
Full report: R. Sandefur (2015). “Elements of Professional Expertise: Understanding Relational and Substantive Expertise Through Lawyers’ Impact.” American Sociological Review. 80 (5), pp. 909-933.
Link: http://asr.sagepub.com/content/80/5/909.abstract. If you have trouble accessing the report Andy Davies may be able to help.
Sample: 18 studies of the impact of lawyers in civil litigation. Sample sizes in the studies summed to a grand total of 18,179 cases.
The Details: Studies of the impact of lawyers in civil litigation contexts (such as landlord-tenant disputes or child welfare cases) frequently show that legal assistance improves case outcomes for litigants significantly. This author reviews several such studies and although the actual size of that impact varies considerably from study to study (and sometimes disappears) the general picture is that litigants acting with legal assistance do indeed get substantially better case outcomes: ‘lawyers range from 100 percent less likely to prevail…to 2,352 percent more likely to do so’ (p.920).
Sandefur then goes on to examine whether legal assistance makes a difference in contexts where knowledge of substantive law, or complex procedural rules, are present. As expected, lawyers make a larger impact in cases where procedures are more complex, presumably because their professional expertise helps litigants navigate courts and procedures that would otherwise be too complex or opaque for the uninitiated. More puzzlingly, however, legal assistance made lesser impacts in substantively more complex legal case types than in substantively simpler ones. Whatever it is that lawyers contribute to litigant success, Sandefur argues, it is not their knowledge of substantively complex law.
Sandefur concludes that what she may be seeing is the ‘relational’ advantages that lawyers confer in civil legal contexts – that is, their ‘skill at negotiating the interpersonal environments in which professional work takes place’ (p.924). She notes that the types of cases she analyzes are often given short shrift by courts, and are frequently conducted with limited attention to due process protections. As such, the impact of legal representation may be so great simply because ‘the presence of any lawyer, as opposed to no lawyer at all, signals something important about a case to the people involved in processing it’ (p.925).
Full report: R. Sandefur (2015). “Elements of Professional Expertise: Understanding Relational and Substantive Expertise Through Lawyers’ Impact.” American Sociological Review. 80 (5), pp. 909-933.
Link: http://asr.sagepub.com/content/80/5/909.abstract. If you have trouble accessing the report Andy Davies may be able to help.
Sample: 18 studies of the impact of lawyers in civil litigation. Sample sizes in the studies summed to a grand total of 18,179 cases.
The Details: Studies of the impact of lawyers in civil litigation contexts (such as landlord-tenant disputes or child welfare cases) frequently show that legal assistance improves case outcomes for litigants significantly. This author reviews several such studies and although the actual size of that impact varies considerably from study to study (and sometimes disappears) the general picture is that litigants acting with legal assistance do indeed get substantially better case outcomes: ‘lawyers range from 100 percent less likely to prevail…to 2,352 percent more likely to do so’ (p.920).
Sandefur then goes on to examine whether legal assistance makes a difference in contexts where knowledge of substantive law, or complex procedural rules, are present. As expected, lawyers make a larger impact in cases where procedures are more complex, presumably because their professional expertise helps litigants navigate courts and procedures that would otherwise be too complex or opaque for the uninitiated. More puzzlingly, however, legal assistance made lesser impacts in substantively more complex legal case types than in substantively simpler ones. Whatever it is that lawyers contribute to litigant success, Sandefur argues, it is not their knowledge of substantively complex law.
Sandefur concludes that what she may be seeing is the ‘relational’ advantages that lawyers confer in civil legal contexts – that is, their ‘skill at negotiating the interpersonal environments in which professional work takes place’ (p.924). She notes that the types of cases she analyzes are often given short shrift by courts, and are frequently conducted with limited attention to due process protections. As such, the impact of legal representation may be so great simply because ‘the presence of any lawyer, as opposed to no lawyer at all, signals something important about a case to the people involved in processing it’ (p.925).
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