Abstract: We analyze lawsuits involving publicly-appointed lawyers in a labor court in Mexico to study how a rigid law is enforced. We show that, even after a judge has awarded something to a worker, the award goes uncollected 56% of the time due to the highly formalistic nature of the enforcement process. Workers with more than seven years of tenure, however, do not leave these awards uncollected because their legally-mandated severance payments are larger. Differences in the probability of receiving compensation after trial, both across lawyers and across workers with different levels of tenure, are not due to differences in win rates at trial. These differences in the probability of receiving compensation are entirely attributable to post-trial differences in the probability of enforcing the judgment. Hence we show how excessive legal formalism generates ineffective and inconsistent enforcement. To better explain these facts, we develop a simple model of litigation that includes costs of collecting awards. Observed differences in lawsuit outcomes across lawyers are consistent with the predictions our model, in which firms take advantage of plaintiffs who either have bad information or are unwilling to undertake the costly task of enforcing a judgment.

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