Silk

I have been watching the UK legal drama Silk and it occurs to me that our adversarial court system, and this is not very surprising I guess, is strongly biased in favour of those that have financial means.

The quality of the solicitor and the barrister seem to make a large difference to the outcome, if the show is to be believed.

I wonder if the relationship between dollars spent and legal outcomes have been quantified? That is a statistical analysis of cases that correlates dollars spent in defence versus other factors. This study would attempt to understand the relationship between dollars spent and the likelihood of not guilty verdict, or the impact of dollars spent on the severity of the punishment.

I also query whether the benefits of more being spent asymptotes, or is it non-linear?

If there is a relationship then maybe those with greater means should be handicapped.

Considering that it would be hard to handicap the binary guilty/not guilty verdict what is needed is a scaling factor which increases with dollars spent on defence, and is then used to multiply any financial penalty or the term of any gaol sentence.

This would also work to limit how much people spent on defence because if they spent a lot and still got a guilty sentence then the severity of their penalty would go up accordingly. They would have to start weighing up the cost benefits of spending all that cash on silks and the natural outcome would be a contraction of the spread in legal defence costs.

Just kidding.