Here are a couple of reports that might help put things in perspective:
One from Florida: Lawyer income up – The Florida Bar
One from Ontario: http://www.ontariojobfutures.ca/profile4112.html
What methodology are you using in making this assertion? what is an acceptable rate of lawsuits by your methodology?
Not buying the market arguments.
The leagle profession (as a whole, not indivieual lawyers) is in a rather unique position of being able to stimulate demand for it’s own product. A personal injury lawyer creates a demand for a defense lawyer, a team of defense lawyers creates a demand for a team of product liability lawyers, etc.
But if lawyers create a demand for even more lawyers (which I do not buy), that would work against the proposition that there are too many lawyers.
The client pays the costs in addition to the hourly fee, even of telephone calls and photocopying.
I am both (1) a lawyer, and (2) a libertarian/free market type guy, BUT, I agree with the point that the legal profession is able to stimulate demand for its product.
I think that this is primarily because the law is an oligopoly, and many legislators and all judges are lawyers. So they will tend to make decisions that favor the legal profession. Specifically this means that they will tend to push the law in the direction of (1) complexity (in the form of detailed statutes and regulations and (2) lengthy and expensive procedures (in the form of, for example, extensive pretrial discovery.
Now, having said that, whether there are “too many” lawyers is a very tricky question. For what it’s worth I (making no secret of my bias as a member of the profession) believe the answer is no. For one thing, as noted above, many lawyers spend their time facilitating commerce. That sounds like a bunch of hooey maybe, but here’s what I mean. Take two business people, a guy who runs a t-shirt company and a guy who leases office space. Well, those two guys want to sign a lease, and both of them “just want to get the deal done” without a lot of silliness and legalese. Well, there’s actually a point to all that legalese. And the point is to think about what will happen, not if everything goes right, but if something goes wrong. What if the city condemns the building. What if the t-shirt guy wants to use his own internet provider rather than the internet provider that the building owner has already signed a deal with. What if there’s a fire and the building is partly but not completely destroyed, what happens then? A good lawyer, who knows about these transactions, and has handled many of them and heard about many many more, is able to help everyboyd think this through so that the deal is clear for all concerned. And that is worth a lot.
Furthermore, even considering the adversarial ambulance chasers that we all love to hate, whether somebody is an “ambulance chaser shyster” or somebody sticking up for the little guy when nobody else will, depends a lot on which side of the dispute you’re on.
Any way of improving these things?
I mean, when you read a story like, say, this:
$250K, minimum, for the legal defense of a kid whose only transgression was refining a search engine for his school. He didn’t trade any files. He didn’t even design the search engine, he just made it work better.
There is something wrong with this system.
I don’t know the rest of the facts of this case, but even if this kid was guilty as hell, it shouldn’t have cost him a quarter of a million to defend himself in court.
I have a friend who’s a civil engineer. He got stiffed by a client, took the case to Federal Court, and after the legal fees, he got back 50 cents to the dollar of the original bill. I don’t know how many tens of thousands of dollars he spent trying to get his money back, but he (a fairly well off individual) was able to do it. And his comments about that stuck with me:
The law has been priced out of the regular person’s means.
I’m a free-market sorta guy myself, so I don’t want to believe there’s too many lawyers. But something is very wrong here. So is there any way of fixing this? It’s kind of a big question, and you of course don’t have to answer with a novel, but you could do wonders for my sense of legal fairness by giving me one or two things that could be made better. Because as long as blatantly unfair cases like this appear, people will look for someone to blame. And right now, the easiest people to blame are the lawyers.
In my ethics class, we had some suggestions: 1) increase the amount of lawyers, difficult because you don’t want any joe schmoe to be a lawyer, because the laws and precedent are difficult to apply; 2) make loser pay legal fees, but this may have a chilling effect on law suits, though there are statutes that allow winner to apply legal fees to the verdict; 3) make the law simpler, but this can a) needlessly complicate things in an already complex system already; b) create unfairness where the law was intended to make things more fair, vice versa.
The overall problem is that the world is not black and white, but many, many shades of gray. It would be much easier to say that this type of activity is wrong, no matter what, but that would essentially cut into the people’s beliefs of fairness and justice. In other situations, where a law sounded better on paper, application of it in real life becomes so much more difficult that test cases are needed to see how the issues play out.
I don’t have a lot of experience with civil law jurisdictions, but something tells me that where problems and issues might be alleviated, they cause other problems and issues not anticipated. There are movements to suggestions that I had listed up top, but the very nature of the law dictates that such changes are going to implemented at a snail’s pace.
I just joined the boards after many a year lurking, so forgive me if this rambles or comes off as too much, too soon.
As a young attorney myself (graduated from law school in 2006), I have to say that there is a glut of lawyers in the Dallas metroplex. I think this might’ve been asked from a “layperson” P.O.V., but in case there are any out there who are looking to get into the field, here’s a quick summary of my story.
Without getting into the specifics of my particular story regarding my first year in the “working world”, I will say that I worked for a commercial litigation firm where I learned the M.O. of the head of the firm (consisting of himself, another attorney and a legal assistant) was to hire someone fresh out, work them to death and then let them go. Actually, usually they quit, due to the long hours and the small pay.
I was duped into the job by his persuasive interview where he told me the benefits of a small firm vs a larger one (getting to do more with a case, as opposed to being a cog in the machine; more time in front of a judge; etc.). Well, once I accepted the offer, I realized he pulled a bait-and-switch: worked much longer than initially told, boss was clinically bi-polar, all three of them had deep animosity for each other… But, for some reason, they all stuck around.
Anyway, long story short - the type of work quickly degraded from high-profile insurance litigation to that of the typical “ambulance chaser” - hit and run, slip and fall, etc. The typical practice was to hope that the insurance company would settle, because there’s no way the case would hold up in court, barring a jury who was already biased against “big business.” (And yes, there are many more people with that mindset than I’d ever care to think) I was miserable for a year, but having only one year of experience, it’s very difficult to transfer to a new firm. I only wish I was still there, if only because I have so much material for pitting.
Luckily, I finally found a position doing transactional work, and subsequently, I have been much happier. Unfortunately, however, I’ve found my story is not unique to my classmates, or even friends in other parts of the country.
I’ve had a few friends who have been wondering if they should apply to law school and I’ve offered the following few tidbits.
-
If you are thinking about applying to law school, it’d be best to have a few years of “real world” experience under your belt, first. This’ll help not only with applying to law school (some schools, such as Northwestern, find a few years in the working world as a very desirable quality in applicants) but also when it comes to applying to jobs. I went to law school right out of college and while I don’t think I suffered from burn-out, I wonder if things might’ve gone different.
-
I’ve found that friends who are looking to specialize (such at patent law or tax law) have had a much greater “success rate” in terms of finding employment.
So, yeah, diatribe aside, I’d say there’re a lot of attorneys, but only in certain fields, with personal injury civil litigation being at the bottom of the period.
The difference being, a dentist can put in a filling in during a 45 minute appointment. Try finding a lawyer who can complete a divorce in 45 minutes.
Dentists (in general everyday practice) do a lot of small things for a large number of people. Each person’s issue doesn’t take all that much time. That’s just not the way it works with most legal issues. Divorces, real estate transactions, probates, contracts, writing nasty letters…it all takes lots of time. So, each individual lawyer, on average, can’t serve the same number of people that a dentist can. Ergo, a higher ratio of lawyers to population than dentists.