Hi, and welcome back to Anacus, our first episode of 2015, and we wish you a happy new year.

I'm Dahlia Lithwick, Slate's Supreme Court correspondent.

So we're in the last week of a little break in oral arguments of the Supreme Court, and I confess I've spent it recovering from a whopping back injury.

But we figured we'd use this week's podcast

to talk a little bit more broadly about how cases make their way up to the Supreme Court,

who the lawyers are who bring them there, and what happens when they get there. Last month,

Reuters published a really fascinating study that got a little bit lost in the Christmas rush.

It offered some provocative answers to these

questions. It's called the echo chamber. And the upshot is that less than 1% of the lawyers who

filed petitions at the U.S. Supreme Court actually get their cases heard. And yet 43% of the cases

that actually are taken by the court come from a tiny elite cadre of kind of super lawyers.

I've characterized them in the past as the Harlem Globetrotters of the Supreme Court litigators because they're amazing.

They can spin basketballs on their arms.

They can sink a three-pointer behind their back.

Later in our podcast, we're going to hear from not one,

but two of these super lawyers. But first, we wanted to turn to Joan Biscupic, who writes for Reuters and is one of the co-authors of this piece. Joan, welcome back to the show. Thank you, Dahlia. So as I understand it and let me know if I mischaracterize this, the point, the overarching point of the echo chamber is that if you want

your case heard at SCOTUS, you are six times more likely to get it there if you hire one of

these super lawyers. Yes, we wanted to look at the success rates for lawyers submitting petitions

for certiori. As you know, Dahlia, those are the filings that launch a case at the Supreme

Court. And it's a very high hurdle for the lawyers and their clients trying to get noticed

by the justices and picked up and have their appeals set for oral arguments. So we looked at a

nine-year period at more than 10,000 petitions involving about 17,000

...