Predicting future litigiousness

Abstract

Using a national sample of adults with various legal experiences, the current study examines the impact of prior legal experiences, general attitudes about lawyers and the legal system, and status characteristics on individuals' perceived likelihood of hiring a lawyer for resolving various personal problems in the future. Persons who have been involved in prior legal disputes, who have more positive attitudes about lawyers, and who hold more favorable views about the effectiveness of law in resolving conflict report significantly higher chances of hiring an attorney. Individuals' assessments of their future litigiousness, however, are largely independent of their status characteristics (e.g., gender, income, education, age) and the quality of treatment in their prior legal disputes (e.g., ratings of procedural justice, level of satisfaction with case outcome, and how their lawyer handled the case). The paper concludes by discussing the implications of these findings for improving the quality of legal services and for the future use of law as a method of conflict resolution.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 18 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.