Reuters has released a study showing that a relatively small number of elite attorneys have been involved in 43% of the cases the Supreme Court has taken over the past few years. The Reuters study, entitled The Echo Chamber, shows that most of these lawyers represent corporate interests, and their participation in a case makes it much more likely that the Court will agree to hear it.

A Reuters examination of nine years of cases shows that 66 of the 17,000 lawyers who petitioned the Supreme Court succeeded at getting their clients' appeals heard at a remarkable rate. Their appeals were at least six times more likely to be accepted by the court than were all others filed by private lawyers during that period.

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The Reuters examination of the Supreme Court's docket, the most comprehensive ever, suggests that the justices essentially have added a new criterion to whether the court takes an appeal – one that goes beyond the merits of a case and extends to the merits of the lawyer who is bringing it.

The results: a decided advantage for corporate America, and a growing insularity at the court. Some legal experts contend that the reliance on a small cluster of specialists, most working on behalf of businesses, has turned the Supreme Court into an echo chamber – a place where an elite group of jurists embraces an elite group of lawyers who reinforce narrow views of how the law should be construed.

Of the 66 most successful lawyers, 51 worked for law firms that primarily represented corporate interests. In cases pitting the interests of customers, employees or other individuals against those of companies, a leading attorney was three times more likely to launch an appeal for business than for an individual, Reuters found.

In a SCOTUSBlog interview, study co-author Joan Biskupic discusses the outsized influence of corporate interests, including how it makes it harder for ordinary people to find the same caliber of high-powered lawyer as the corporate interests have available to them.

The domination of the docket by corporate interests has consequences for consumer and employee cases. Because corporate lawyers can't take those cases (based on firm-wide conflicts of interest), individuals are often left to a smaller, and collectively less successful, pool of lawyers.

In a nation founded upon Equal Justice Under Law, any indication that everyday Americans are systemically disadvantaged against powerful corporations at the Supreme Court must be taken seriously. Workers, consumers, and small business owners should certainly have the best legal representation possible.

Americans should also have the best judges possible, be it on the Supreme Court or any other court. Unfortunately, we have seen for some time now that a small but consistent majority of the Supreme Court is made up of conservative ideologues who are far more likely than not to rule in favor of corporate interests, even if they have to bend the law and ignore logic in order to do so.

That needs to change.