Medical Malpractice Litigation and the Market for Representation: Evidence from Indiana

Abstract

How concentrated is the market for representation in medical malpractice (med mal) cases, whether for plaintiffs or defendants? How often do plaintiffs proceed pro se, and with what results? Do successful lawyers start off with better cases to begin with or do they add more value to the cases – or both? What law school did elite practitioners attend – and where are they located? Building on earlier work involving Illinois, we use a dataset of every med mal case filed in Indiana during 1976-2014 to identify the 2,717 plaintiff-side firms and 781 defense-side firms that handle these cases. We stratify these firms into three tiers and compare case outcomes with different tier match-ups. Finally, we use propensity score weighting to place some boundaries on the effect of representation on the chances of prevailing and on total recovery.

Keywords: pro se, represented, market for representation