In practice, in order for this notification to be carried out in a timely fashion, the plaintiff must participate in the process by making a motion to request immediate notification, as well as accompanying or having her lawyer accompany the court employee to the firm’s place of business. This notification often takes some time, and firms, especially smaller ones, may do their best to avoid being notified properly.

Once due notification has taken place, the firm has 72 hours to send payment to the tribunal. If the firm does not pay within 72 hours, another hearing must be scheduled in which the judge should order a court actuary to appraise the firm’s assets, seize a sufficient number of assets to pay the judgment the firm owes, and proceed to a sale of these assets, after which the court pays the judgment amount to the worker directly.<sup>4</sup> This process is akin to putting the firm through bankruptcy and therefore can be very costly, especially because the firm may block proper notification, move its place of business, or hide its assets. The court’s order of an appraisal and sale of assets should be part of the same original lawsuit file from which we extract our data, however we find very few such orders. Discussions with both public and private lawyers have led us to believe that once firms have been duly notified, they generally do pay the award amount.

At any point before the court’s decision is announced, parties may resolve their dispute by settlement. However, unlike many other areas of law in Mexico and elsewhere, the labor courts must both approve and record settlements. Unratified settlements are not legally binding, so that parties to a dispute will generally prefer to have their settlements ratified by the court. Hence, our data from lawsuits include detailed information about settlements.

Apart from the protections in the federal labor code, the federal government and the states provide workers under their jurisdictions with free legal representation through public agencies generally called Procuradurías de la Defensa del Trabajador. The public prosecutors who work for these agencies are licensed lawyers or interns in their fourth year of law school. Public lawyers are not allowed to receive any compensation from their clients, who are assigned to them by the agency. They are paid a salary by the agency, which does not depend, at least not explicitly, on their performance. For methodological reasons that will be explained later, these public lawyers will be the focus of our empirical work.

# 4 Data and Preliminary Statistics

We have assembled a data set comprised of all lawsuits filed in the Junta Local de Conciliación y Arbitraje del Estado de México - Valle de Cuautitlán, during 2000 and 2001.<sup>5</sup> This tribunal is located in an industrial area towards the northern part of the Mexico City metropolitan area. Overall 718 cases were initiated in 2000 and 1,850 cases were initiated in 2001. Cases involving public lawyers,

> 4 This procedure is governed by Title 15 of the LFT, Articles 939-975.

> 5 These data were obtained by the authors using a new law governing freedom of governmental information in Mexico.

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