Empirical Legal Studies

Storage Solutions for Large Datafiles

Over the years, I have collected a lot of datasets that I have attempted to archive on the university file server.  While computer space is not very expensive these days, it is not free.   These files have, collectively, far exceeded the standard faculty allotment.   

Fortunately, we finally found a simple solution:  The HP Personal Media Drive, which is an external hard-drive with 500GB of memory.  Years worth of files only take up a small fraction of the space.  And just by connecting an USB port, I can quickly backup my entire laptop hard-drive.  It is also very portable.  That is a lot of peace of mind for under $200. 

Large Law Firm Hiring -- Introducing the "Funnel Cloud"

Why do law students follow U.S. News ranking?  In a story in last week's National Law Journal, Andrew Morriss and I claim that USNWR provides a rough guide to future employment prospects.   Yet, drawing upon data on hiring patterns from the NLJ 250 (the 250 largest firms based on number of attorneys) and employment outcomes from the ABA-LSAC Official Guide, Andy and I demonstrate the serious financial perils of overreliance on USNWR.

The story has a lot of data.  The chart below, however, ended up on the editing room floor.  I call it the "funnel cloud."  It shows the percentage of students at each law school that were hired by a NLJ 250 firm.  [Side note: Why is the NLJ 250 a good barometer?  Because the starting salaries make law school tuition look like a bargain.  Based on data made available to us through the Law Firms Working Group,  the weighted average (based on firm size) starting salary at an NLJ250 firm for 2007 was $152,424.]

In my opinion, the above chart has at least two takeaways: (1) the funnel cloud formation shows large law firm employment payoffs are non-linear and that the vast majority of schools offer similarly modest, but not insignificant, entree to this sector; (2) based on the volume of green and red at the top of the chart, most large firms prefer to recruit deeper into the class at a Top 20 school (and will pay a price premium of $160,000 per year) rather than shifting their model to lower ranked schoolss.    53% of all new NLJ250 jobs between 2005 and 2007 went to Top 20 biggest feeder schools from 2005.  See also Leigh Jones, Hiring More Deeply into Top Schools, Nat'l L. J., Apr. 14, 2007.  You would think that by 2007, the Top 20 would have been tapped out.  Not so.

The empirical findings of this 2007 article by Dinovitzer and Garth, which is based on After the JD data, suggest that this elitism has unintended negative consequences in terms of high attrition rates. 

Here are links to other graphics in our recent NLJ story:

Employment trends for law school grads: The top 100 out of 194 ABA-approved schools ranked by percentage of 2005 graduates at NLJ 250 firms.

By Region (defined by states containing Top 10 legal markets):

• New York
• California
• Illinois
• Texas
• Washington, D.C.
• Massachusetts
• Georgia
• Pennsylvania
• Alabama to Kentucky
• Louisiana to Nevada
• Ohio to Wyoming
• Composite report of all 11 regions
• Methodology

New Data: Duration of Capital Appeals

New this week at ICPSR: Multistate Analysis of Time Consumption in Capital Appeals, 1992-2002, by Barry Latzer and James H. G. Cauthen (both of CUNY - John Jay).  The skinny:

Despite public controversy over the length of death penalty appeals, little empirical work has been done on the time allocated to the capital appeals process. The purpose of this study was to perform a multistate empirical analysis of the time expended in direct appeals of capital cases. The researchers included decisions from 14 states that they believed to be representative of the 37 states that have enforceable death penalty laws. For each of the 14 states included in the study, the researchers examined every capital case decided on direct appeal by the courts of last resort between the dates January 1, 1992, and December 31, 2002. The researchers developed a case database by examining a variety of sources. For each of the 1,676 cases in the multistate database, the research team collected time consumption data for each of the following five phases of the direct appeal process: (1) the postsentence stage, (2) the preparation stage, (3) the argument stage, (4) the decision stage, and (5) the supreme court stage. Variables include state, case characteristics, court opinion variables, dates, and time consumption variables.

The states are Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Missouri, Nevada, New Jersey, North Carolina, Ohio, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, and Washington.

New Release: UCR Crime Data

Over on his blog, Andrew Gelman notes the release of a massive new dataset on crime:

"The time series in question are monthly data from 1960-2004, for over 17,000 police departments, for seven crime types (murder, rape, robbery, aggravated assault, burglary, larceny, vehicle theft), as well as their sum (the so-called Crime Index), and an additional 19 subcategories – e.g., robbery with a gun, knife, personal weapons (hands, feet, etc.), or other; attempted rape; auto, truck or bus, or other vehicle theft...The data consist of monthly counts of these crimes reported by police departments throughout the country to the FBI as part of its Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program."

The data are being made available by Michael Maltz, at Ohio State's Criminal Justice Research Center.  Get them at http://sociology.osu.edu/mdm/UCR1960-2004.zip.  Maltz also makes some great points about the reliability and validity of self-reported crime data; go check it out.

New ICPSR Data Releases

For Monday, January 6, 2008.  Here.

Hoffman on Empiricism and Corporate Law Research Agendas

I have spent the last several days at the AALS Conference in New York City listening to some interesting panels and having lots of interesting conversations with colleagues from other law schools or law-related institutions--stuff that impacts both my teaching and scholarship (and what I will be blogging about in 2008).

If anyone doubts the substantive value of attending AALS, check out David Hoffman's post on paths for corporate law scholarship, which flows from his conversations with professors from other law schools.  Dave outlines six potential paths, and five draw on some form of empiricism.  Here is an excerpt.

I've had a few conversations at the AALS this year revolving around the same topic: where is corporate law scholarship going? These conversations are naturally framed by being a (still relatively) junior scholar, not wanting to pick a research agenda or field that will be seen to be a dead-end in a few year's time. Over these conversations, folks have suggested several different types of corporate law research agendas. Obviously, the categories overlap and over-simplify, but it seemed useful to me to list them here, with a few thoughts on the obvious promises and perils of each.

1.  Market Quant-heads: Using Tobin's Q and other quantitative methods to evaluate governance.  Pros:  still lots of low-hanging fruit, interesting results, multiple papers per data set.  Cons: some barriers to entry if you aren't afraid of being publicly wrong, severe barriers to entry if you are; co-authorship with finance folks is useful but quality proxies are unreliable; probably little connection with your day-to-day teaching responsibilities; unclear value-added over business school professors; not clear how easy it is to place this work in flagship mainstream law reviews, if your law school values this currency (which it shouldn't).

2. Contract Quant-heads:  Evaluating databases of agreements to shed light on private law-in-action.  Pros: great work being done in entrepreneurial law, and huge areas of private corporations and LLCs are still basically unexplored; the learning curve, once you are familiar with STATA, is not steep; lawyer competencies are essential to the project. Cons: coding takes time, and projects can take >18 months to complete; finding appropriate data sources requires connections you likely do not have at the beginning of your career; you will almost certainly eventually want to get a grant, which creates its own set of bureaucratic issues.

3. Doctrinalists:  Careful reading of Delaware cases, often informed by some L&E or BL&E theory.  Pros: there are always new cases to write about; consulting gigs abound; lots of tie-in with teaching; influence over development of law; doctrine probably still places pretty well. Cons: in a globalizing economy, Delaware may be a declining stock to ride; elite law schools will likely not hire you; the "grand theory" field is very rich and possibly occupied.

Dave also discusses modelers and historical analysis, experimental design, and  qualitative comparative governance.  Very thoughtful stuff.

Gender and Part-Time Law Firm Employment

A recent ABA Journal story had the headline, "NALP: 75% of Part-Timers are Female."  The article was making the point that although virtually all law firms have part-time policies, they are (a) rarely used, and (b) disproportionately female.  But the 75% female/25% male breakdown understates the true disparity.   In reality, a huge proportion of female attorneys exit firms as they have children.  Thus a better measure of differences between the genders is a comparison of the percentage of part-timers in the firm by gender.

The chart below [Click to Enlarge], which is generated from this NALP data, suggests a much larger imbalance among the male and female associates.

Two observations:  (1) Among those associates who chose to work at corporate law firms [in reality, that is the type of firm listed in the NALP Directory], female associates are between 10.5 to 13.9 times more likely to work part-time than their male counterparts; (2) this dynamic -- surprisingly, to my mind -- has little or no relationship to firm size.

New ICPSR Data Releases

New ICPSR data releases here.  Two datasets that caught my eye:

• 2038 State Court Processing Statistics, 1990-2004: Felony Defendants in Large Urban Counties

• 3486 Immigrants Admitted to the United States, 2000

California Appellate Court Legacy Project

I stumbled across what could be a promising archival project involving the California appellate courts:

In 2006, the California Appellate Court Legacy Project was undertaken to interview all retired justices in the state, as well as active justices who may be nearing retirement. Overseen by the Appellate Court Legacy Project Committee (chaired by Associate Justice Judith L. Haller of the Fourth Appellate District, Division One), interviews are videotaped or audiotaped and conducted by interviewers selected from within the appellate branch. Ultimately the tapes will be made available to judicial colleagues, historians, scholars, law students, and members of the public. The resulting archive will be an historical record of both the personal experiences of individual justices and the evolution of the California appellate courts.

Unfortunately, I haven't found any information about the project's current status or what types of questions the interviewers are asking the judges. Actually, I can't find much of anything about this project other than the statement above, which comes from the California Courts' website.

New ICPSR Data Releases

Here (for November 25, 2007).