Paralegals and Substitution Among Labor Inputs in the Law Firm
利用1977年美国65个大都市统计区的律师事务所数据，估计了律师助理、助理律师及其他员工之间的短期替代弹性，发现律师助理与文秘等非律师人员的替代性更强，对律师就业影响有限。
DESPITE the recent interest in economic analysis of the law firm and the market for legal services,1 little attention has been given by economists to a phenomenon of increasing importance in the markets for inputs to the production of legal services-the rise of the paralegal. To illustrate, between 1972 and 1977 the number of practicing attorneys in the U.S. increased by 41 percent but the number of paraprofessionals in legal services increased by 135 percent. If we look at all law firms in the U.S., we find the share of labor cost paid to paralegals almost doubled in those five years, increasing from 3.7 percent to 6.7 percent. On the other hand, the cost share of salaried associate lawyers was stable over the same period. This raises the questions of how easily substitutable the various labor inputs are for one another. In this paper we examine this issue by using a short-run labor substitution model, estimating cost-share equations derived from a translog labor price function. Data from the 1977 Census of Service Industries are used to derive quantity and price measures for three types of labor inputs-associate lawyers, paraprofessionals, and all others-for law partnerships in 65 Standard Metropolitan Statistical Areas. The primary result is that paralegals seem more closely substitutable with other workers (secretarial, clerical, messengers) than with associate lawyers, suggesting that wages and employment of lawyers are unlikely to have been significantly affected by the influx of paralegals.