bq. Moneyball analyses reveal that law firms are often systematically overvaluing some attributes, ignoring others that really matter, and generally making bad tradeoffs in both entry level and lateral lawyer “drafts.”
Here is the article. The authors are Steve Gibson, William Henderson, Caren Ulrich Stacy, and political scientist Christopher Zorn. All are principals at Lawyer Metrics. Here is one nice finding:
bq. Bias among brilliant equity partners? Yes, it happens. A good example is attitudes toward law school pedigree. The data suggests that, in several firms, a subset of partners who attended elite law schools often give higher performance ratings to associates who also attended elite law schools—even when non-elite associates are statistically identical on every other measure. In contrast, when looking at the same group of associates, partners who did not attend elite law schools observe no performance gap.
Hat tip to Brandon Bartels.