Aligning the Interests of Lawyers and Clients

The potential conflict of interest between lawyers and clientsis well known. If a lawyer is paid for his time regardless ofthe outcome of the case, the lawyer may wish to bring the caseeven when it is not in the best interest of the client, mayspend more hours working on the case than the client would want,and may reject a settlement when the client would be betteroff if it were accepted. Alternatively, if the lawyer is compensatedaccording to the conventional contingent fee arrangement—underwhich he is paid a fraction of any trial award or settlementbut bears all of the cost of litigation—the lawyer mayhave an insufficient incentive to bring the case, may spendtoo little time working on it if it is brought, and may encouragea settlement when the client would be better off going to trial.In this article we propose a method of compensating lawyersthat overcomes the conflict of interest between the lawyer andthe client. Our system is a variation of the conventional contingentfee system, but, in contrast to that system, we would have thelawyer bear only a fraction of the cost of litigation—thesame fraction that the lawyer obtains of the award or settlement.We demonstrate that when the fraction of the cost that the lawyerbears equals the fraction of the award or settlement that heobtains, he will have an incentive to do exactly what a knowledgeableclient would want him to do with respect to accepting the case,spending time on the case, and settling the case. Under ourmodified contingent fee system, a third party would compensatethe lawyer for a certain fraction of his costs, in return forwhich the lawyer would pay that party an up-front fee. In thisway, the client would not bear any costs, even if the case werelost, just as under the conventional contingent fee system.     

The use of multiple informants to assess children's maltreatment experiences

Most researchers rely exclusively on the reports of protective service workers to determine children's abuse history. In this report, information about children's maltreatment experiences is obtained from protective service workers and three supplementary sources of data: parents, medical records, and clinical observations. Fifty-six children from 34 families receiving protective services for verified reports of physical abuse, neglect, sexual abuse, and/or emotional maltreatment participated in the study, with most children known to have experienced more than one type of abuse. The supplementary data provided important information about the range and severity of children's maltreatment experiences. Review of the parent and medical record data led to identification of 28 children who had additional types of maltreatment experiences that were not reported by their protective services workers—nine cases of physical abuse, two cases of neglect, five cases of sexual abuse, and 12 cases of emotional maltreatment. Supplementary data also revealed information about incidents of specific types of abuse that were more severe than those reported by the children's protective service workers in an additional 24 cases. A method was devised to synthesize information provided from the different sources of data examined in this report to derive 0–4 point ratings of four categories of maltreatment experiences: (1) physical abuse, (3) neglect, (3) sexual abuse, and (4) emotional maltreatment. The Kappa reliability coefficients for each of these scales were .88, .73, .83, and .90, respectively. Data demonstrating the relationship between these maltreatment ratings and various indices of the children's socioemotional and cognitive functioning were also presented to provide preliminary support for the validity of these scales. The findings from this study suggest that multiple sources of data should be examined in order to obtain accurate assessments of children's maltreatment experiences, and that independent raters can synthesize discrepant data to obtain reliable and valid estimates of children's abuse history. Clinical and methodological issues relevant to the improved assessment of children's maltreatment experiences are also discussed.     

Good Cuts,Bad Cuts: The Need for Expenditure Analysis in Decremental Budgeting*

Quantitative targets are widely used in decremental budgeting. On the macro-level, governments set global limits for the growth of public expenditures, government deficits, or the ratio of government spending to GNP. On the micro-level, reduction targets are frequently assigned to spending ministries or agencies on a selective basis or across-the-board. While this kind of targetry appears to be indispensable to achieve cutbacks, it is also very deficient in that it treats public expenditures as a fungible commodity, consisting of interchangeable units of account. As austerity policies are coming of age, the inherent weaknesses in the targets approach attract increasing attention, and there is growing concern about the quality of austerity measures. To make sound decisions on such measures, governments must develop a better understanding of the characteristics and properties of various public expenditures. This paper outlines four varieties of expenditure analysis that may contribute to ‘the leap from quantity to quality’ in decremental budgeting.