Lawyers are as susceptible to errors in decision-making, and in giving advice to clients, as lay people, and this has a significant impact on the timing and quality of settlement of disputes. So we are told in a thought-provoking article in the Southern California Law Review, How Lawyer’s Intuitions Prolong Litigation.

Before we react and say this could never happen here, it is worth acknowledging that research into decision-making is providing more and more information to enable us to understand better what we do.

The thrust is that most litigation settles but sometimes later than it should, with the attendant cost, time and dissatisfaction.

Read more about excessive reliance on intuition, confirmation bias, framing and the sunk cost fallacy in my article here:

http://www.scotsman.com/news/legal-gut-feelings-can-lead-to-hiccups-1-3274425