Accessing Higher Quality Justice

Joyce Sadka, Enrique Seira and Christopher Woodruff

No 20508, CEPR Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Policy Research

Abstract: Research shows that lawyers affect legal outcomes, but little is known about how clients choose lawyers. We conduct an experiment with plaintiffs in the Mexico City Labor Court. We compare plaintiffs’ choice of lawyers in a control group and two treatment groups: one that increases the plaintiff’s knowledge of likely case outcomes and the other that facilitates meetings with public lawyers. The knowledge treatment group contracts higher-quality lawyers, with whom they are more satisfied. The treatment halves the market share of low-quality “ambulance chasers†. The meeting treatment increases the use of public lawyers but does not increase satisfaction.

JEL-codes: J52 J83 K31 K41 K42 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025-07
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://cepr.org/publications/DP20508 (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:20508

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
https://cepr.org/publications/DP20508

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CEPR Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Policy Research 33 Great Sutton Street, London EC1V 0DX, UK.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CEPR ().