Legal Research

Settlement Is Good

By Simon Fodden

A piece in yesterday’s New York Times talks about the results of a soon-to-be-published study which finds that in most cases (61%) where plaintiffs refuse to settle and go to trial they wind up with less than the proposed settlement would have given them. That settlement is good is hardly news: according to the authors of the study somewhere between 80 and 90 percent of cases in fact settle; but the study hopes to raise questions about the reasons for going to trial in the 2054 disputes studied. The study, ?Let?s Not Make a Deal: An Empirical Analysis of Decision Making in Unsuccessful Settlement Negotiations,? by M. Asher, R. Kiser and B. McShane, is to be published in the forthcoming volume of Cornell’s Journal of Empirical Legal Studies (Vol. 3, No. 2, September 2008). (I’ve not been able to find a preprint on the web.)

Full post as published by Slaw.ca on August 08, 2008 (boomark / email).