In order for the lawyers to be credited that utility, we need to look at the counterfactual.
Need to look at the marginal effect of adding one more attorney to the field. The number of attorney/​vaiue curve is likely to be logarithmic, because the first attorneys will likely be going after the low hanging fruit in litigation. If you are truly outstanding and able to provide better expected value than an alternative in the role, there might be more value...
ETG is likely much higher value, imo, because the counterfactual of the person making lots of money is someone who likely donates less and/​or ineffectively, if at all.
In fact the limiting factor may be funding for high value litigation opportunities, so maybe even in the Civil Rights battles, you may have had higher impact funding litigation and other high EV activities than direct work.
The counterfactual is definitely something that I think I should examine in more detail.
Agreed that marginal effect would be fairly logarithmic and I probably should have considered the fact that there is quite a lot of competition for employment at Earthjustice (i.e. need to be top 0.001% of lawyers to have counterfactual impact).
I am pretty completely convinced by the argument that seeking to work for Earthjustice is worse than ETG actually, so I might go and make some rather sweeping modifications to the post.
I think that the exercise does at least stand as a demonstration of the potential impact of systems change nonprofits with new/​neglected focus and that Earthjustice is a success story in this realm.
Do you have a high level of confidence that Earthjustice is too large/​established for it to compete with funding new and/​or neglected projects?
I have moderate to high confidence that it is too diversified to be a viable big funding target, compared to the alternative of standing up our own org devoted to effective climate litigation. I surmise that the amount of its resources EJ wants to spend on (e.g.) anti-carbon litigation would be fairly insensitive to our org’s existence, because it wants to be seen as active in that area. Thus, I think there would be significantly less internal funging than for bringing EJ on as a grantee.
In order for the lawyers to be credited that utility, we need to look at the counterfactual.
Need to look at the marginal effect of adding one more attorney to the field. The number of attorney/​vaiue curve is likely to be logarithmic, because the first attorneys will likely be going after the low hanging fruit in litigation. If you are truly outstanding and able to provide better expected value than an alternative in the role, there might be more value...
ETG is likely much higher value, imo, because the counterfactual of the person making lots of money is someone who likely donates less and/​or ineffectively, if at all.
In fact the limiting factor may be funding for high value litigation opportunities, so maybe even in the Civil Rights battles, you may have had higher impact funding litigation and other high EV activities than direct work.
Hi Brad,
The counterfactual is definitely something that I think I should examine in more detail.
Agreed that marginal effect would be fairly logarithmic and I probably should have considered the fact that there is quite a lot of competition for employment at Earthjustice (i.e. need to be top 0.001% of lawyers to have counterfactual impact).
I am pretty completely convinced by the argument that seeking to work for Earthjustice is worse than ETG actually, so I might go and make some rather sweeping modifications to the post.
I think that the exercise does at least stand as a demonstration of the potential impact of systems change nonprofits with new/​neglected focus and that Earthjustice is a success story in this realm.
Do you have a high level of confidence that Earthjustice is too large/​established for it to compete with funding new and/​or neglected projects?
I have moderate to high confidence that it is too diversified to be a viable big funding target, compared to the alternative of standing up our own org devoted to effective climate litigation. I surmise that the amount of its resources EJ wants to spend on (e.g.) anti-carbon litigation would be fairly insensitive to our org’s existence, because it wants to be seen as active in that area. Thus, I think there would be significantly less internal funging than for bringing EJ on as a grantee.