Abstract
Who are the most effective lawyers in the Labor Court of Rio de Janeiro? Using data from tens of thousands of legal cases, we construct a network of lawyers (directed and weighted) in order to answer this and other questions. The empirical evaluation reveals a network structure with features commonly founded in other real social networks such as short distances and heavy tailed weight distribution. Metrics such as vertex strength, Pagerank, and closeness were used to rank vertices, identifying the most effective lawyers in the network. By using external information about lawyers and their relationship to different trials we (partially) validate the rankings obtained through the network analysis. This study suggests that the network structure induced by lawyers contains useful information concerning their effectiveness within the community.
Highlights
The Labor Court in Brazil is responsible for settling disputes concerning labor relationships
In addition to the three network metrics considered in this paper, we show the ranking according to two simple metrics: number of legal cases won; total claim value across all cases won
In order to more objectively assess the quality of the network rankings, we evaluate the correlation between the ranking metric and two simple statistics, namely the number of cases won and the total claim value won
Summary
The Labor Court in Brazil is responsible for settling disputes concerning labor relationships. We are interested in using the lawyers’ network to rank lawyers according to their effectiveness in conducting legal cases. The top ranked lawyer according to in strength has won 89% of the cases (187) and the same fraction of claim values (5.3 million reais).
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