I’ve been wondering whether the level of actual litigation experience young lawyers are exposed to in Big Firms vs small or solo practices is readily ascertained via a small questionnaire.
Anecdotally and intuitively we know that criminal defence lawyers, for example, get into court much more often early on in their careers than civil litigators in big firms.
So I conducted a Twitter Survey.
It’s not a huge sample size but even these results speak for themselves.
Only 16% of BigLaw Associates in their fifth year had participated in more than 25 contested hearings, whereas 62% of those in sole, small or criminal law practices had that many outings under their belt.
Conversely, while only 8% of small firm 5th year lawyers had argued any part of 5 or fewer cases in those 5 years, fully 26% of those in big firms had such little actual litigation experience.
These contrasts clearly have the potential to affect how quickly lawyers in different litigation settings develop advocacy skills – my own view.
Here are the results based on a few dozen respondents.
anitaszigeti 