March 15, 2004

I have been meaning to read..

I saw a paper on SSRN last week by Professor Lester Brickman on Effective hourly rates of contingency-fee lawyers and it made me start to think about the presence or absence of free market incentives for legal fees. One of Professor Brickman's points is that lawyers do a good job at screening the winners from the losers when they select cases and therefore they are not taking on the kind of risk that one would expect. Now the ABA is thinking maybe there is something wrong with the system of contingency fees.
Mar 15, 2004 9:13:30 PM

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Freedom v. Liability The Economic Freedom of North America Annual Report came out this week as did the Harris Survey on State Liability System mentioned below. I thought an interesting experiment would be to look at their respective ranks and plot them just...
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What is the Church's Objective Function? Consider the details of the grievous errors outlined in the National Review Board report, which, while levied against the bishops in the first instance, encompass their lawyers as well: Attorneys used “tactics [that] often were inappropriate for the Church, and which tended to compound the effects of the abuse that already had been inflicted.” These tactics included defenses that “could be construed as blaming the victim,” arguing that the Church had no responsibility for priests by claiming they were “independent contractors,” and “in general adopting an overly adversarial approach.” Moreover, the report says that “certain lawyers recommended, and certain bishops insisted, that the victims sign confidentiality agreements, which stifled their ability to discuss their experiences openly and thwarted awareness by the laity of the problem.” In addition, lawyers counseled Church leaders not to meet with or apologize to victims, even when the abuse was clearly substantiated. Not only does the report correctly say that this approach undermined the primary pastoral mission of the bishops, but it suggests that it ultimately led to greater legal liability as many victims said they would not have filed suit had someone heard their complaints and apologized.

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