Litigated Cases: The Selection Effect Revisited

Priest and Klein (1984) predicted a 50-percent plaintiff winning rate among litigated cases, independent of the decision standard. Lee and Klerman (2015) specify conditions under which this result would be true. Klerman and Lee (2014), however, show that, under plausible circumstances, selection effects are only partial. The present paper strips a complicated problem down to an easily accessible model where the plaintiff winning rate among litigated cases can be calculated explicitly. In the discrete setting of the present paper, the 50-percent winning rate would hold if and only if the defendant's fault were uniformly distributed.