Law Sites has a story and a critique of a recently launched company helps consumers find lawyers based on their win rates. The ABA Journal also has the story here. Although I believe the company is genuinely trying to provide access to lawyers for people who don't necessarily know how to find a good lawyer, I think this approach is, to put it mildly, dumb. Maybe with some major changes they can come up with something that will provide better information for consumers, but the initial idea does not make much sense to me.
The first time the idea was discussed, about a year ago, when a different company proposed the same approach, it was received with negative reviews and the company abandoned the idea.
There are many reasons why using "winning records" as a measure of attorney quality. First, not all legal services can be measured in terms of wins and losses. Second, the vast, VAST, majority of cases don't go to trial, so any win-loss records based on trial results only measures a minimally small number of litigated cases. Third, in those cases that settle, both clients can easily feel they got a "win" when their lawyers exceed their expectations as to the terms of the settlement. An approach to measuring skill based on winning records does not take into account negotiation skills which, needless to say, are important in litigation. A defendant's lawyer who gets a settlement that saves the client a lot of money may be much more skilled than a plaintiff's lawyer who claims to have "won" the settlement. Simply stated "winning" or "losing" if it can be identified as an actual result to begin with, is not a reliable measure of lawyering skill. Providing consumers with such limited and misleading information may actually be counterproductive.
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