it’s almost a slogan: “Too many lawyers”. I’m not sure if this is true. But I did look up the yellow pages under “Attorneys” for my town, and it seemed like there were more than you could have ever hoped for.
I tried looking at other places to see how many they had. Ex: Costa Mesa, California, has 100,000 people, and 1,039 lawyers (Martindale.com). That’s 1 lawyer per 100 people.
Is this “too many”? If so, why, and what are the implications? Or is it “Too many lawyers, not enough good ones”?
How many in your town? And the population of your town?
How many would you say make a good ratio to the population.
There’s as many as can be supported on the market.
What there is is an overabundance of lawsuits.
That’s the issue isn’t it?
Lots of lawyers means lots of people trying to do their job. So they encourage people to sue. I assume you have seen the ads on TV for them.
I have seen first hand my company sued over their stock dropping. In the end, after the lawsuit was settled, the shareholders received practically nothing. The lawyers were the only real beneficiaries.
Just one example…there are many, many more. Ultimately I would say they are a serious drag on society and the overall economy. But there is no reasonable way I see to stop it. There are plenty of legitimate lawsuits and conceiving a way to sort the bullshit ones from the ones that are legitimate is near impossible.
I’m not a lawyer, I don’t have hard numbers on this, but until the Dope Law-Squad rides into this thread to make this argument in a more persuasive manner (one would hope), I think that a small portion of legal work is actually represented by adversarial proceedings. Rather, the law is working well when almost nothing goes to trial because the law yields predictable results that people don’t waste the time, money, and effort on going to trial over because they know the result beforehand.
Even in the case of a fairly ideal, efficient world, we still need lawyers around to tell us exactly what the results and edicts of this predictable law is and help us to implement it where necessary. The way in which modern, highly efficient organizations such as Fortune 500 corporations interact isn’t through handshakes and a general sense of fairness, it’s through thorough and carefully crafted contracts written by lawyers.
So, some lawyers are no more worthless than investment bankers, and just because their profession exists doesn’t automatically make them a drain on the “productive” members of society. Certainly, just like investment bankers, perhaps the interactions they mediate are made much more complex than necessary to help drive demand for their services, but that’s true in most every other profession as well. Lawyers aren’t unique in this regard.
But I just want to make the argument that a wealthy, productive society will definitely have and need a lot of lawyers. They do fill a useful purpose.
Good sig for that comment, threemae.
And an overabundance of laws. A regulatory state drives the creation of hordes of laywers required to sort through it all. We tend to think of lawyers as the guys suing people and defending people, but they are huge numbers of lawyers working for companies just helping them keep afoul of government, or working to help companies take advantage of government programs. Environmental lawyers, patent attorneys, lawyers who check ordinances and deal with cities, and it goes on and on.
Then there are the corporate lawyers who produce contracts and read other contracts. Lawyers who handle real estate and title transfers.
Trial Attorneys are just one small branch of the lawyering biz.
“huge numbers of lawyers working for companies just helping them keep afoul of government”
Hmm. No wonder there are so many laws, if there are all those lawyers out there trying to keep companies in trouble. 
Whether there are too many or not enough laws can get into one’s philosophy of life & etc., but one thing that spawns laws, IMHO, is that there are a lot of lawyers, corporate or otherwise, who interpret the letter of a law to their advantage, leading to situations where the law needs to be modified to fill loopholes. In general, it’s difficult to write down a law (or pretty much anything else) that means the same thing to those who wrote it and to those who read it, so there are hordes of lawyers who make very comfortable livings in the interpretation business.
I do know that Mrs. No.9 and I were recently in a minor accident on a Friday. By Tuesday, we had 15 solicitations from lawyers looking for our business, with another 4-5 on Wednesday, plus a couple from chiropractors and neck/back specialists. Fortunately, there were no injuries and the other guy’s insurance settled fairly and paid promptly, so all ended well. If I’d had more time and a more nefarious attitude, it would have been interesting to see how that would have played out. There’s obviously quite an industry related to the ambulance-chasing side of the profession.
How did the lawyers contact you? How did they know you were in an accident?
Attorneys are under restrictions as to how and whom they can contact, some states restrict contacting victims of an accident until 30 days
Lots and lots of people go their whole lives without ever needing a lawyer…and most people only need one once or twice in a lifetime. If you stand on a street corner and ask people for the name of “their lawyer” probably only 1 in 10 at best would have an answer, and some of those would have to think to come up with the name.
Most people, on the other hand, see a dentist on a regular basis…often enough to tell you the name of their dentist off the top of their head.
Compare the number of dentist listings to the number of attorney listings.
I didn’t count the numbers, but the Albuquerque Yellow pages has about a half inch of attorney listings,that would be pages totaling a half inch thick, not 1/2 a column inch. The same directory has only about 1/8" of dentist listings.
Yes…way too many lawyers looking for something to do.
1 percent is huge! Check out this wiki page - there are thousands of professions, trades, administrative, craft and unskilled jobs. And all are very useful (except for maybe Ufologist).
Perhaps not needing a personal lawyer, but anyone who’s bought or sold a house has had a lawyer involved. If you signed an employment contract, it was probably drafted by a lawyer. Your company’s policies were probably vetted by lawyers. Same with insurance contracts, non-disclosure agreements, contracts to have work done on your home, etc. Lawyers are intricately tied to many of the activities we engage in.
I have four friends who are lawyers. Only one of them even works for a law firm, and she doesn’t do trial law - she evaluates contracts and studies government regulations. The others work for private companies handling their various legal work.
That’s because the nature of dentistry is literally in your face. It’s all personal contact. Aside from trial laywers and personal services lawyers like divorce attorneys, lawyers are like engineers - you don’t know the names of the engineers who designed your car, your streets, and the computer you’re typing on. That doesn’t mean there’s an excess of them - it just means the nature of their job is somewhat anonymous.
This is a completely irrelevant statistic. Why should we compare lawyers to dentists? Your analogy would be closer if you compared lawyers to accountants - most people don’t have a ‘personal accountant’ or know their accountant by name, but there sure are a hell of a lot of them out there.
Supply and demand – if there were too many lawyers, their hourly rates would not be so high.
deleted… my legal story had too many details which would identify the parties involved.
Let me just say this… There may be too many lawyers, but like any other profession, there is always a demand for talented ones.
FML
Just to clarify, I did mean to imply that 1 percent is a lot. (I wasn’t using the stat to show how few lawyers there might be).
Especially since a large segment of the population are children, and less likely to need lawyers
Ah, but there are costs to running a law firm which keep costs above a certain level, no matter what. Court/discovery costs are brutal.
The accident report is a public record, so they must have people, who as part of their job, go through the accident reports on a routine basis and send out the prepared materials. On the plus side, we received 4 copies of the report, which we would have had to request separately had we wanted a copy. We also received 2 DVDs that supposedly gave the lawyers’ pitches about how they would recover all our costs, make our lives worth living again, and so on. As I said, quite an industry that I wasn’t aware of.
I’m guessing all these lawyers employeed by private firms don’t have listings in the yellow pages. Most dentists DO. So your point serves to strengthen my argument…In spite of significant numbers of them holding steady jobs in private industry, vast hoards of lawyers are still compelled to market thier services to consumers.
Along with the radio and TV ads, I take the large investment made by personal injury lawyers as a strong indication of oversupply.
I’m going to start checking the job classifieds for “Lawyer wanted” listings. Should be a few unless they are in oversupply. I’ll let you know how that goes.
The costs of running a law firm are not that big when compared to a lawyer’s hourly rate billed to clients. Some costs are directly billed to the client in addition to the hourly rate. Most costs are tax deductible.
Disbursements such as court filing fees, discovery/exam reporter and transcription fees, and expert witness fees are paid on top of a lawyer’s fees. So are specialized legal research program usage fees, long distance telephone calls, postage, delivery charges, photocopying and faxing. The lawyer should break even for all of these.
A lawyer pays his or her staff, but much of this staff work is billed out to clients (clerk work is billed, but secretarial work is not billed), so overall, staff should be break-even or be a profit centre for the lawyer.
Once you take the expenses that are recovered from the client in addition to the lawyer’s hourly fees, such as those set out above, you are left with the lawyer being out of pocket for student debt, partnership buy-in debt, professonal membersip fees, insurance, rent, basic phone and yellowpages, computer and software, some legal research subscriptions that are not already billed to the client, professional development costs, furniture, pens, paper and general office supplies (staplers, stickies, etc.). That’s not much to have to cover, given an hourly rate that is usually three figures per hour.
Also keep in mind that most expenses are tax deductible.
The costs of running a law firm are not that big a deal when compared to a lawyer’s hourly rate. If there were too many lawyers, lawyers would not be able to charge fees that are so far above their costs - that’s just supply and demand. That’s why lawyers tend to have decent lifestyles – upper middle class for the most part. If there were too many lawyers sharing the pie, their disposable incomes would lessen, and their lifestyles would decline to the point that they would ship out to another career.
Compelled? There are lots of reasons behind whether a lawyer would prefer to use his or her skills in private industry, or practice as a lawyer in a law firm, but compulsion isn’t one that comes to mind. Take being a sole practioner, for example: only take on the clients that you want, only work when you want, charge whatever the hell you want, minimize time spent on administration and management.
Intensive advertising is more a functon of seeking competitive advantage rather than oversupply – not a question of climbing to the to of the rat pile verses starving, but rather a question of eating well verses feasting.
That’s not how employment in the professon works. Most lawyers’ jobs in law are found through personal connections and word-of-mouth. Proportionately, only a very few are found otherwise, such as through headhunters or through advertising in trade publications (bar association, law reports, legal newsltters, etc.)
If you want to learn how lawers are doing financially, whether the emplyment situation is tightor not, and whether things are getting better or worse for lawyers, have a look at surveys and reports put out by various law associations.