Knowledge in Youth Is Wisdom in Age: An Empirical Study of Attorney Experience in Torts Litigation

Abstract

The effect of attorney experience in civil litigation has not been causally identified because attorneys everywhere are not randomly assigned to clients and detailed measures of jurist experience have not been available. Using a unique data set from Taiwan, we measured attorney experience by either the total number of civil cases they have represented from 2000 to 2014 or their number of years in practice. We argue that theoretically, there was hardly any case selection by litigants and litigators in Taiwan’s flat-fee attorney market. Combining these data with another unique data set we compiled from pain and suffering damages lawsuits regarding personal injury in weighted ordinary least square models after full matching and coarsened exact matching, we find that experienced plaintiff attorneys claim more than inexperienced ones.