Full Answer
On April 27, 2017, Jack Talaska, a lawyer for the poor in Lafayette, La., had 194 felony cases. 113 clients had been formally charged. The rest are not pictured. High-level felonies carry sentences of 10 years or more and should each get 70 hours of legal attention, according to a workload study.
High-level felonies carry sentences of 10 years or more and should each get 70 hours of legal attention, according to a workload study. For Mr. Talaska, that’s more than two years of full-time work. Mid-level felonies require 41 hours each. A few of Mr. Talaska’s clients faced life without parole. Such cases, on average, require 201 hours apiece.
The bottom line: Mr. Talaska would have needed almost 10,000 hours, or five work-years, to handle the 194 active felony cases he had as of that April day, not to mention the dozens more he would be assigned that year. (The analysis did not include one death-penalty case on his roster, the most time-consuming type of case.)
The rest are not pictured. High-level felonies carry sentences of 10 years or more and should each get 70 hours of legal attention, according to a workload study. For Mr. Talaska, that’s more than two years of full-time work. Mid-level felonies require 41 hours each. A few of Mr. Talaska’s clients faced life without parole.
In Providence, R.I., the scene in Courtroom 4C is the same on many mornings.
Stephen Hanlon thinks he has a new solution to this problem: better data, and a lot of it.
Note: The Texas study recommended that a much larger share of cases should go to trial. The recommended time spent on each task is based on the share of cases that should be resolved by trial as recommended by the study. The study found that defenders spent the recommended amount of time, 30 minutes, on social work.