Assigned Counsel Clients Do Worse—Incentives, Not Lawyer Quality, Explain Why

🔍 What's at Stake

Governments in the United States must provide free legal services to low-income people accused of crimes. Many jurisdictions rely on assigned counsel systems, where private attorneys represent indigent defendants on a contract basis. Defendants represented by assigned counsel are more likely to be convicted and incarcerated than defendants with privately retained attorneys.

📂 What the records show

Detailed court records are used to investigate the mechanisms behind this outcome gap and to assess policy implications. Comparisons focus on case outcomes for indigent defendants assigned private attorneys versus those who hire counsel privately.

🔬 What was tested

• Whether adverse selection among lawyers (less capable or lower-quality attorneys being those who take assigned cases) explains the worse outcomes.
• Whether incentive problems within assigned counsel systems—i.e., moral hazard—better account for the disparity.

📈 Key findings

• Adverse selection among lawyers is not the primary contributor to the assigned counsel penalty.
• Evidence points to incentive problems (moral hazard) within assigned counsel arrangements as a more important driver of higher conviction and incarceration rates for assigned clients.

💡 Why it matters

Reform efforts to improve indigent defense outcomes should target incentive structures in assigned counsel systems—such as payment, monitoring, and contract design—rather than focusing mainly on selecting different lawyers.