Do Attorneys Add Value?: Part II

I recently stumbled across yet another paper setting out to empirically assess whether attorneys generate independent value for their clients.  Put slightly differently--and in the words of the author, Erica Hashimoto (Georgia), the paper tests the long-held assumption that "there is no good reason for a [criminal] defendant to choose self-representation, and those who make that choice are either mentally ill or foolish."  Hashimoto's findings run against conventional wisdom.

Although in terms of research design and execution this paper is perhaps not as methodologically sophisticated as the Lederman tax court paper, Hashimoto's largely descriptive account is interesting and contributes to a foundation for future work.  (Orin Kerr provides additional commentary on the Hashimoto paper here.)

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[Kate Litvak]

Stefanie: how did you deal with endogeneity? People with lousy cases may be unable to find contigency-fee lawyers to appeal them, so they go pro se, which might drive the result... and excluding contingency-fee cases would bias the sample.

[Stefanie Lindquist]

Some years ago, Susan Haire, Roger Hartley and I published a paper in the Law and Society Review finding that in the appeals process, pro se litigants are indeed disadvantaged. The paper analyzed products liability lawsuits in the U.S. Courts of Appeals. So in the appellate process, representation does appear to matter.

[Kate Litvak]

I am willing to overlook the absence of a decent instrument, but this paper doesn’t have a single basic regression! Or even a correlations table. A bit too much for a paper claiming causation, no?