4 ms·

The biggest reason is that newly barred lawyers are god-awful at doing complicated work. It takes a lot of on the job training to get a lawyer worth anything. S

The biggest reason is that newly barred lawyers are god-awful at doing complicated work. It takes a lot of on the job training to get a lawyer worth anything. So the real market of actual lawyers is pretty restrained by the number of entry level jobs established lawyers hire. A good 50% of law students are out of law within a couple years, and large number of those never work as a lawyer. It's tough to create your own job because nobody trusts you. And even if you do work as a lawyer, not all lawyers are fungible. They guy who spends all day at Immigration court can't litigate a contract dispute over a rail line. The guy who writes patents doesn't know how to handle a bankruptcy. So you can get a guy to do your DUI for 500 bucks, but my firm would charge you 550/hr just to talk to you on the phone. Another big reason is that law is a very prestige and pedigree heavy industry. Why would a firm hire a Duke grad for 160k, when you can get 4 Brooklyn law school grads for that? Rightly or wrongly, the Brooklyn grads are seen as incapable of doing the job. Clients then hire the well known firm for their big cases and matters because they have a good reputation. That is sort of changing. Big companies use smaller firms for smaller matters and cases where spending 700 an hour for legal work doesn't make sense. Some would argue legal rates aren't even too high. For example, for transaction lawyers, their fees are a fraction of what the investment banker takes on a deal. But the biggest reason that legal services are expensive is that legal service is man-hour heavy and essentially doesn't scale. Look at even blue collar services that are manhour heavy like mechanics. A car mechanic costs 80-100 bucks an hour. What is really need is for the legal system to streamline. As long as it takes 20 hours to do your divorce, it'll never be cheap.

AnthonyMouse 11y ago
> What is really need is for the legal system to streamline. As long as it takes 20 hours to do your divorce, it'll never be cheap. The problem is that it's an adversarial process surrounded by politics. As long as human judges and juries are deciding high stakes outcomes on a case by case basis, people who are good at rhetoric and persuasion will be in demand. What streamlining implies is making outcomes more deterministic so that everybody knows what will happen ahead of time and there is no room to argue about it. But that is fundamentally a political problem. The laws need to be clearer and less complicated.
- rayiner 11y ago
  So it's worth spending a few minutes watching David Boies, one of the top trial lawyers in the country, depose Bill Gates: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tYLBA1Ldq6M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tYLBA1Ldq6M. He's no great orator. He's got an affable midwestern affect, but mostly he sounds like a college professor. Winning cases has little to do with rhetoric, or conventional persuasiveness. Almost nothing goes to trial, so the audience is almost always a judge and his or her staff, who aren't persuaded by rhetoric. What they are persuaded by is clear, straightforward application of what is almost always pretty simple law to extremely complex factual scenarios. Imagine a couple breaking up, and your being asked to decide whose fault it was. Think of the extended, factually-intensive drag-out fights two people can have over something as simple as a relationship gone sour. Two years ago, he got her a gift for her birthday, but did he pick it up on the way home from work because he forgot to buy it ahead of time? Did he remember her birthday or did he forget? Is he really an uncaring inattentive boyfriend? That's litigation, except with many more people involved, much more complicated scenarios, and potentially a lot of money at stake.
  - AnthonyMouse 11y ago
    > What they are persuaded by is clear, straightforward application of what is almost always pretty simple law to extremely complex factual scenarios. If the law requires consideration of extremely complex factual scenarios then it isn't simple law. Laws that look simple because they use words like "reasonable", aren't. Creating simple, just laws is hard. But progress can be made by not attempting to adjudicate intractable quagmires like "fault" in a divorce.
    - harryh 11y ago
      Making simple laws by simply ignoring the complexity of the real world won't solve people's actual problems.
      - AnthonyMouse 11y ago
        It isn't the role of the courts to micromanage people. Judges are not marriage counselors. Civil courts are primarily tasked with deciding the most just disposition of assets. But the most just disposition of assets is not giving them to the lawyers. To have a just outcome the amount spent on resolving the dispute has to be much smaller than the amount in controversy. If the law doesn't do that then it would be more just to flip a coin or split the difference. But splitting the difference isn't "right" either, it's only better than the "very wrong" we have in many cases now. You can get closer than that to the ideal outcome of perfect dispute resolution at zero cost. There are rules that produce significantly-better-than-random outcomes at low cost, and those are the ones the law should use, even if the decisions are somewhat less optimal than the ones that come at unjustifiably high cost.
albertop 11y ago
> What is really need is for the legal system to streamline. As long as it takes 20 hours to do your divorce, it'll never be cheap. Also lawyers have no incentive to streamline the process. They are all billing by the hour, so the lack of efficiency is passed onto their clients.
debaserab2 11y ago
> What is really need is for the legal system to streamline. As long as it takes 20 hours to do your divorce, it'll never be cheap. My fiance is a divorce lawyer, and she basically says this all the time. She's able to work much faster than her much older colleagues simply because she knows how to use Google to look up things and she doesn't depend on a secretary for transcribing things on their PC (I'm not joking). There are so many aspects of the industry that are still in the stone age.

AnthonyMouse 11y ago

> What is really need is for the legal system to streamline. As long as it takes 20 hours to do your divorce, it'll never be cheap. The problem is that it's an adversarial process surrounded by politics. As long as human judges and juries are deciding high stakes outcomes on a case by case basis, people who are good at rhetoric and persuasion will be in demand. What streamlining implies is making outcomes more deterministic so that everybody knows what will happen ahead of time and there is no room to argue about it. But that is fundamentally a political problem. The laws need to be clearer and less complicated.

rayiner 11y ago
So it's worth spending a few minutes watching David Boies, one of the top trial lawyers in the country, depose Bill Gates: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tYLBA1Ldq6M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tYLBA1Ldq6M. He's no great orator. He's got an affable midwestern affect, but mostly he sounds like a college professor. Winning cases has little to do with rhetoric, or conventional persuasiveness. Almost nothing goes to trial, so the audience is almost always a judge and his or her staff, who aren't persuaded by rhetoric. What they are persuaded by is clear, straightforward application of what is almost always pretty simple law to extremely complex factual scenarios. Imagine a couple breaking up, and your being asked to decide whose fault it was. Think of the extended, factually-intensive drag-out fights two people can have over something as simple as a relationship gone sour. Two years ago, he got her a gift for her birthday, but did he pick it up on the way home from work because he forgot to buy it ahead of time? Did he remember her birthday or did he forget? Is he really an uncaring inattentive boyfriend? That's litigation, except with many more people involved, much more complicated scenarios, and potentially a lot of money at stake.
- AnthonyMouse 11y ago
  > What they are persuaded by is clear, straightforward application of what is almost always pretty simple law to extremely complex factual scenarios. If the law requires consideration of extremely complex factual scenarios then it isn't simple law. Laws that look simple because they use words like "reasonable", aren't. Creating simple, just laws is hard. But progress can be made by not attempting to adjudicate intractable quagmires like "fault" in a divorce.
  - harryh 11y ago
    Making simple laws by simply ignoring the complexity of the real world won't solve people's actual problems.
    - AnthonyMouse 11y ago
      It isn't the role of the courts to micromanage people. Judges are not marriage counselors. Civil courts are primarily tasked with deciding the most just disposition of assets. But the most just disposition of assets is not giving them to the lawyers. To have a just outcome the amount spent on resolving the dispute has to be much smaller than the amount in controversy. If the law doesn't do that then it would be more just to flip a coin or split the difference. But splitting the difference isn't "right" either, it's only better than the "very wrong" we have in many cases now. You can get closer than that to the ideal outcome of perfect dispute resolution at zero cost. There are rules that produce significantly-better-than-random outcomes at low cost, and those are the ones the law should use, even if the decisions are somewhat less optimal than the ones that come at unjustifiably high cost.

albertop 11y ago

> What is really need is for the legal system to streamline. As long as it takes 20 hours to do your divorce, it'll never be cheap. Also lawyers have no incentive to streamline the process. They are all billing by the hour, so the lack of efficiency is passed onto their clients.

debaserab2 11y ago

> What is really need is for the legal system to streamline. As long as it takes 20 hours to do your divorce, it'll never be cheap. My fiance is a divorce lawyer, and she basically says this all the time. She's able to work much faster than her much older colleagues simply because she knows how to use Google to look up things and she doesn't depend on a secretary for transcribing things on their PC (I'm not joking). There are so many aspects of the industry that are still in the stone age.