DO ATTORNEYS DO THEIR CILENTS JUSTICE? AN EMPIRICAL STUDY OF LAWYERS' EFFECTS ON TAX COURT LITIGATION OUTCOMES

Testing empirically whether attorneys improve outcomes can be very difficult, particularly because the information easiest to access, published decisions, ignores the large universe of settled cases. Fortunately, there is a forum that lends itself to statistical analysis of this question. In the United States Tax Court ("Tax Court"), a large portion of the non-government litigants pursue their cases pro se, providing a natural laboratory for comparing the outcomes that pro se and represented litigants reach with the same adversary, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). Tax Court litigation also offers a rare and valuable opportunity to examine settlement results because it retains records for cases the parties settle. This Article exploits this opportunity to test the effects attorneys have on case outcomes, using a unique data set consisting of a random sample of settled and tried Tax Court cases. It tests empirically the effect the presence of counsel for the taxpayer has both on the financial outcome of the case (the proportion of the tax in issue recovered by the IRS) and the length of time to settlement or trial.