Spesialiserte advokater mot dommere med generell kompetanse - En analyse om effekten av advokaterfaring på saksutfall i Norges Høyesterett 2018-2020

Abstract

This thesis examines the influence of lawyer experience on case outcomes in the Norwegian Supreme Court from 2008 to 2020. The human capital theory has long claimed that there is a positive relationship between on-the-job-training and performance. The theory discussing legal qualities claims that lawyers acquire specialized knowledge by prosecuting cases in the court, and that this knowledge in combination with the trust-advantage they receive as repeat players, will be very advantageous in their attempt to convince the judges. While the case facts and the law are important components of understanding litigation outcomes, external factors such as lawyer experience have shown to be related to case outcomes in research on the U.S. Supreme Court. Evidence of a causal connection between lawyer experience and case outcomes is however lacking for the courts outside the U.S. By extending prior attorney capability studies of U.S. judicial decision-making to the Norwegian Supreme Court, the following research question is established: Can the presence or absence of an experienced lawyer help explain case outcomes in the Norwegian Supreme Court? To enable a comparison between experienced and inexperienced lawyers, the thesis measures how the lawyers fare against a comparable opponent - the state represented by an attorney general. Following the theory and tools of causal research the thesis non-parametrically process the data by using a coarsened exact matching approach to estimate the causal effect of lawyer experience. Although the thesis showed that the odds of a part winning the case in the Norwegian supreme court increased by 27 percentage if the lawyer had experience in this group of civil cases between 2008 and 2020, the difference was not statistically significant (p>0.05) and the estimate of the difference in the general population is not clear.