Much of the empirical work exploring the relation between professional malpractice and insurance focuses on the medical context. Emerging research expands this focus to include lawyers' professional liability claims. In Liability Insurer Data as a Window on Lawyers’ Professional Liability, Tom Baker (Penn) and Rick Swedloff (Rutgers-Camden) exploits the "best publicly available data" and finds:
"remarkable stability over thirty years in the distribution of claims by area of practice among both small and large firms, a large percentage of claims (64-70%) involving de minimus expense (less than $1000) in the small firm market, and in the large firm market a declining rate of 'real claims' per 1000 lawyers, a declining rate of real average gross loss per claim, and stable real premiums per lawyer since the early 1990s."
The authors properly caution readers about data limitations that restrict their findings' generalizability.
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