Abstract
In a comprehensive empirical investigation (N = 71,405) we analyzed the development of legal expertise in a critical 1-year period of academic legal training in which advanced law students start practicing to solve complex cases. We were particularly interested in the functional form of the learning curve and inter-individual differences in learning. Performance increases monotonically with the number of practice exams following a slightly concave learning curve without any considerable kinks. Considering the performance development over time, however, the curve is not monotonic and shows intermediate drops in performance. We provide evidence which suggests that these drops are due to cyclic drops in motivation. There are about equally sized marginal effects of practicing law exams in general and practicing exams in the specific area of law. However, students with high (vs. low) initial performance profit more from practicing exams within a specific area of law whereas students with low initial performance profit more from practicing exams in general. The concave increase in performance with the number of practicing exams is mainly driven by individuals with low initial performance. Those with high initial performance mainly display a linear learning trend. We discuss the practical implications of these findings for academic legal training.
Highlights
When solving complex cases, legal experts such as judges, attorneys and state prosecutors face a challenging task
In a comprehensive empirical investigation (N = 71,405) we analyzed the development of legal expertise in a critical 1-year period of academic legal training in which advanced law students start practicing to solve complex cases
We investigate the development of legal knowledge and expertise (a) over time and (b) by the number of repetitions in solving legal cases
Summary
Legal experts such as judges, attorneys and state prosecutors face a challenging task. Another interesting case are temporary drops in performance (Fig. 1D)—as they have been found, for example, for diagnostic performance of psychotherapists (Witteman and van den Bercken 2007) and in (temporarily increased) response times for perceptual inference tasks (Choi 1993) Such discontinuities can, for instance, be due to entering and leaving qualitatively different stages in the development of knowledge structures/cognitive structures (e.g., Baylor 2001) or motivational effects (e.g., Sturman 2003). Due to the lack of clear predictions concerning the functional form, we conducted informal interviews with advanced law students and discussed the issue with experienced legal scholars in Germany Based on their subjective estimation, we started with the hypothesis that there should be a general increase in performance with a temporary intermediate-drop (D). We expect differences in that students with good initial performance might benefit more from practice
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