“It’s Darwinism – Survival of the Fittest:” How Markets and Reputations Shape the Ways in Which Plaintiffs’ Lawyers Obtain Clients

Abstract

The survival of a plaintiffs’ lawyer’s practice depends upon the generation of an ongoing flow of clients with injuries that the civil justice system will compensate adequately. If this requirement is not met, lawyers will leave this aspect of the legal market for more promising ones. If they do, legal services for injured people will be diminished as a result. In order to find out how this personal services legal market is defined and developed, we interviewed ninety‐five plaintiffs’ lawyers in Texas. These lawyers use four major strategies to get clients: client referrals, lawyer referrals, direct marketing, and other referrals. What any particular lawyer does is shaped by the geographic market from which clients are drawn, and by the lawyer’s reputation. Our findings provide fresh insights for the empirical literature on plaintiffs’ lawyers, and they provide an empirical context for assessing the potential impact of changes in the civil justice system, like tort reform, on the ability of plaintiffs’ lawyers to obtain clients.

Lawyers Seeking Clients, Clients Seeking Lawyers: Sources of Contingency Fee Cases And Their Implications for Case Handling

“…The pattern we will describe closely tracks the patterns described by Daniels andMartin for Texas (1997, 1999) and by Van Hoy for Indiana (1997a). The Texas and Indiana studies rely on detailed, in-depth interviews with practitioners; in the Wisconsin study we use a combination of sources (including a small number of practitioner interviews), and find the same general pattern of client sources.…”

“…21. This appears to contrast somewhat to the situations described by Van Hoy (1997a) and Daniels andMartin (1997, 1999:385-87) for Indiana and Texas, respectively. The apparent absence of paid referrals in Wisconsin cannot be attributed to formal restrictions; the Wisconsin Supreme Court rules governing attorney fees explicitly permit sharing of fees, provided either that the division is proportional to the services performed or that it is by "written agreement with the client and each lawyer assumes joint responsibility for the representation" (Rule 20:15:5(e)).…”

“…Other recent analyses of personal plight legal practice (Daniels & Martin 1999;Van Hoy 1997a;Seron 1996:48-66) generally reported that relatively few lawyers rely upon advertising techniques, although it is not unusual for a lawyer to experiment with advertising or to use advertising as a secondary source; we could find only one study that reported heavy reliance on advertising, and that dealt specifically with franchise, store-front law firms (Van Hoy 1995: 716). In fact, the patterns found by us and others from recent research efforts do not differ substantially from patterns reported thirty to forty years ago (see, e.g., Reed 1969: 71).…”

“…Does this translate into differences in sources of contingency fee clients? Surprisingly, and to some degree in contrast to the situation in Indiana (Van Hoy 1997a) and Texas (Daniels & Martin 1999), the answer is that it does so only in relatively small ways. For example, one might expect that lawyers in large urban communities would be more likely to rely upon impersonal sources such as advertising.…”

“…29. In their studies in Texas and Indiana, Daniels and Martin (1997) and Van Hoy (1997a) place emphasis on substantive specialities. Our study found much less substantive emphasis (and this was true regardless of whether we looked at all respondents or only those who identified themselves as personal injury plaintiffs' lawyers).…”