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Sure. Here are a few examples of "let's make X as hard as possible so someone can never navigate it without a lawyer:" 1) Divorce. 2) Purchase/sale of land. 3)

Sure. Here are a few examples of "let's make X as hard as possible so someone can never navigate it without a lawyer:" 1) Divorce. 2) Purchase/sale of land. 3) Adoption. Notice what's not on my list: civil forfeiture, immigration, corporate mergers. There are certain classes of things which are complicated because e.g. the government wants them to be difficult (immigration), and certain other things which are inherently complicated, but which are made more efficient by cooperation. But there is a third class of thing which should be simple and is not. Transfer of land is complicated because lawyers have a financial interest in making it complicated. Divorce is a little different: you often have two people trying to ruin each other and lawyers enabling that by using procedure and trickery to try to engineer an unfair outcome in favor of a client. But (assuming what I say is true) what is the functional difference between real estate and divorce? I argue there is none. A system which is deliberately engineered to be user-hostile is functionally identical to one where "cruft" accumulates and nobody is motivated to remove it. Also realize that there is a cycle of lawyers deliberately making a legal procedure or practice so complicated that someone needs to stop them because they are creating an obstacle to the good functioning of society. See e.g. 1) Service of process 2) Civil discovery reform 3) UCC adoption

toss1 4y ago
Thx for the answers >> A system which is deliberately engineered to be user-hostile is functionally identical to one where "cruft" accumulates and nobody is motivated to remove it. This could definitely be true. Of course the solution is different. In the case of buildup of cruft, one needs to generate motivation to improve it, whereas if someone is deliberately engineering bad features, one has to find who to fight and fight them. I've been involved with service of process and civil discovery enough to know that they are a pain. We got service on one reluctant witness that was more a bit of luck to make it happen than not, and it seemed like a child's game of "tag". I agree that it needs reform, but who is actively making it more complicated? I've had opponents drag discovery out for years to the point of being sanctioned themselves, but it didn't seem to slow them down, but I'd put that more at the feet of judges that put up with the crap than an opaque process, which seemed at base pretty straightforward - they ask, here's the set of responsive docs. But who would we go after to fix it, and who is opposing us?

toss1 4y ago

Thx for the answers >> A system which is deliberately engineered to be user-hostile is functionally identical to one where "cruft" accumulates and nobody is motivated to remove it. This could definitely be true. Of course the solution is different. In the case of buildup of cruft, one needs to generate motivation to improve it, whereas if someone is deliberately engineering bad features, one has to find who to fight and fight them. I've been involved with service of process and civil discovery enough to know that they are a pain. We got service on one reluctant witness that was more a bit of luck to make it happen than not, and it seemed like a child's game of "tag". I agree that it needs reform, but who is actively making it more complicated? I've had opponents drag discovery out for years to the point of being sanctioned themselves, but it didn't seem to slow them down, but I'd put that more at the feet of judges that put up with the crap than an opaque process, which seemed at base pretty straightforward - they ask, here's the set of responsive docs. But who would we go after to fix it, and who is opposing us?