bq. An offer of free legal representation by an elite cadre of Harvard Law Students does not increase the probability that a client will prevail in his or or her claim. (There was a .04 increase in probability of prevailing, not statistically significant.) What the offer of free legal representation does do, however, is increase the delay that clients experience in the adjudication (The mean time to adjudication for the treated population was 53.1 days versus 37.3 days for the control group, a statistically significant sixteen-day difference.)
That’s Maya Sen’s “summary”:http://www.iq.harvard.edu/blog/sss/archives/2010/12/experiments_and.shtml of this “new paper”:http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1708664&download=yes by James Greiner and Cassandra Wolos Pattanayak. Here’s the abstract of the paper (with my emphasis):
bq. We report the results of the first in a series of randomized control trials designed to measure the effect of an offer of, and the actual use of, legal representation. The results are startling. In the context of administrative litigation to determine eligibility for unemployment benefits, a service provider’s offer of representation to a claimant had no statistically significant effect on the claimant’s probability of a victory, but the offer caused a delay in the proceeding. Because a substantial percentage of the provider’s client base consisted of claimants who were initially denied benefits but who would have that initial denial reversed as a result of the litigation, the delay an offer of representation caused inflicted a harm upon such claimants in the form of an additional waiting time for benefits to begin, this with no concomitant increase in the probability of a favorable outcome. In other words, these claimants would have been better off without the offer of representation. Other classes of claimants were unaffected, but in cases with a certain profile, the delay hurt the financing of the unemployment system, again with no concomitant benefit in the probability of a favorable outcome for the claimant. We were also able to verify a delay effect due to the actual use of (as opposed to an offer of) representation; we could come to no firm conclusion on the effect of actual use of representation on win/loss. Stepping back, we use these results as a springboard for a comprehensive review of the quantitative literature on the effect of representation in civil proceedings. We find that this literature provides virtually no credible information, excepting the results of two randomized evaluations occurring in different legal contexts and separated by over three decades. We conclude by advocating for, and describing challenges associated with, a large program of randomized evaluation of the provision of representation, particularly by legal services providers.
