Attorney Discipline, the Quality of Legal Systems and Economic Growth within the United States
Description
The American Bar Association’s annual Survey on Lawyer Discipline (SOLD) reports complaints and charges regarding lawyer misconduct, the caseload per disciplinary attorney, and each state’s budget for attorney discipline. From these reports, we develop five measures of attorney discipline: 1. COMPLAINTS – the percent of attorneys in the state who receive complaints from the public. 2. CHARGED – the percent of attorneys that are charged with some form of misconduct during the year; 3. CHARGED/ COMPLAINTS – the percent of the attorneys receiving COMPLAINTS that are eventually CHARGED with malpractice; 4. BUDGET (in dollars) – the state’s annual budget for implementing attorney discipline relative to the number of attorneys; and 5. CASELOAD – the number of AD cases per state disciplinary attorney per year. In our study "ATTORNEY DISCIPLINE, THE QUALITY OF LEGAL SYSTEMS AND ECONOMIC GROWTH WITHIN THE UNITED STATES" we use these measures to examine the quality of legal systems within the United States and the relation between this quality and state economic growth. The panel data set, included here, contains the values of the 5 attorney discipline measures for each state from 2000-2017. We use these data in our study.