The Impact of the Performance of Lawyers on Judicial Proceedings:

A Literature Review

Abstract

This article analyzed 32 empirical studies on the impact of the lawyer’s performance on the outcome of the judicial decision. The findings were: the concentration of research in the United States (81.25 percent), civil jurisdiction (62.5 percent), the year of publication in general in the 2010 decade (56.25 percent) and the predominant use of the observational method (75 percent). The great methodological difficulty of these researches is to identify with precision if the impact in the judicial decision stems from the lawyer’s performance or if it is only a consequence of the characteristics of the processes that are being judged, which can be achieved through experiments with research design with distribution cases to balance hidden variables.