Doctoral Dissertation Research: Screening, Sorting, and Selecting in Products Liability Cases: How Lawyers Mediate Access to the Civil Justice System

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How do products liability lawyers screen cases and clients? Socio-legal scholars have long been interested in the ways in which lawyers mediate citizens' access to the civil justice system. In previous work, sociolegal scholars have focused on the influence of costs and benefits, status differences between clients and their attorneys, and firm- and state-level legal cultures on such decisions. This project assesses four theoretical approaches to the phenomenon of litigation in products liability cases. This comparative study, based on in-depth qualitative interviews and ethnographic field observations of 80 products liability lawyers in four U.S. states, representing two types of state-level legal cultures. The PI will conduct interviews with 20 products liability lawyers in each of four states to capture lawyers' reasons, practices, decision-making processes, attitudes, and beliefs about the screening process, juries, tort reforms, and legal cultures. In addition, lawyers' interactions with clients will be observed in order to understand screening as a process that is interactional, negotiated, and dynamic. The proposed project is the first systematic investigation of cultural influences on the screening process. It will also be the first study to employ a multi-method qualitative, comparative analysis to the study of legal professionals, and it is notable in its focus on products liability lawyers, a specialty of personal injury lawyers that has not previously been the explicit focus of significant empirical research.