Document Type
Article
Publication Date
11-2024
Abstract
This paper studies whether plaintiffs' lawyers matter in securities class actions. We use inverse propensity score weighting (IPW) to compare the results in cases led by top-tier firms against those brought by lower-tier firms. This technique addresses case selection effects by using all of the cases led by a top-tier firm and then weighting the cases led by lower-tier firms based on how similar these cases are to the cases led by top-tier firms. We do find that top-tier lawyers obtain better outcomes for shareholders in a subset of securities class actions, specifically the cases against the larger (although not the very largest) companies. Outside of these cases, we find that most of the difference in the results obtained by top- and lower-tier firms disappears when we balance observable characteristics using the IPW technique. Although the top-tier firms do not get better results in most cases, they do invest more hours and money into their cases.
Recommended Citation
Choi, Stephen J., Jessica M. Erickson, and Adam C. Pritchard. "Paying for Performance? Attorneys' Fees in Fraud Class Actions." Empirical Legal Studies 21, no. 4 (2024): 899-926. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/jels.12402
Included in
Legal Ethics and Professional Responsibility Commons, Legal Profession Commons, Litigation Commons, Securities Law Commons
Comments
© 2024 The Author(s). Journal of Empirical Legal Studies published by Cornell Law School and Wiley Periodicals LLC. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License, which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made.