Elizabeth Loftus

Written by Katie Porter Elizabeth Loftus (UC-Irvine Law) has co-authored a new paper on lawyers' abiliy to predict outcomes in litigation. She and her colleagues surveyed about 500 lawyers with pending litigation, asking them to specify a minimum goal for their case and providing a confidence estimate for the chances of meeting that goal. The key finding: "Overall, lawyers were overconfident in their predictions." The article lays out all the ways that this can be harmful to clients, and to our legal system in general. I've been thinking about the role of law schools, and legal educators, in cultivating this optimism bias. The researchers find that lawyers don't get better at estimating outcomes with more years of experience; recent grads and old hands are equally likely to overestimate their odds of success. How can law schools counter this overconfidence? What are the risks of doing so?