There are plenty of caps on lawyers’ pay. Lawyers who take social security cases are limited, federal tort claims are limited to 25% of recovery. In California, attorneys fees for medical malpractice cases are limited and pain and suffering is limited for the client.
Oh, and Republicans are dead set against changing how much lawyers get paid for representing these non-corporate clients. (Most Democrats are opposed to changing it too.)
I for one, do not object to these reasonable limits, and I’m a lawyer. I sometimes handle federal torts.
So you think the people who crippled the economy of the entire world should give themselves huge bonuses off profits garnered with tax payer money? That is very generous of you. Perhaps we should set up a fund to pay educational expenses for their children?
The whole mass of them should have been fired. They should be on the streets . When they claim they will lose their talented employees, I say good. They were corrupt lying thieves who gamed the system to get rich. Then we allowed them to game the TARP money. They should be facing judges.
So if someone hits the cap on a social security case, that means he has to give up his $400,000 salary if he happens to become President of the United States or if he happens to become commissioner of the NFL? Or if the attorney acts as highly paid consultant (advisor) for a particular business deal?
I’m unclear as to what the o.p. is attempting to achieve. The market for legal services is already highly competitive; the reason “white shoe” firms can charge what are frankly exorbitant billing rates for senior associates and partners is because of the panoply of services they can provide compared to smaller firms. At the same time, boutique firms can provide very targeted services for small niches and either sell their services through agreements/partnerships with larger firms, or actually seek merger with them.
Frankly, what most lawyers earn in relationship to the amount of time, stress, and sacrifice they put into their jobs is actually not all that impressive. One lawyer I know who is an associate at a national law firm described a conversation with coworkers during a break in trial preparations where they figured out how much they were making on an hourly basis, and it turned out they’d do better working at McDonalds. If you get to be a senior partner in a firm you get to share in all the profits, of course, but you also bear the costs in a down year, and that is a long slog even to get to that point.
I would like to see limitations on the punitive damages awarded to plaintiffs in class action suits, or at least that punitive damages be placed in general trust in compensatory awards that can’t be recovered from the defendants, as I think this would put a significant damper on the aggressive class action industry that has no intention other than to make a certain (an minority) set of lawyers very rich. This would hit the guys who advertise on the back of buses (“Accidentes!”) and the “I’m the Lawyer Who is Also a Doctor!” who seems to exist on the Yellow Pages directory of every major city. You can’t entirely get rid of such bloodsuckers without damaging the legitimate right of plaintiffs to pursue compensation for damages, but it would at least thin out their numbers.
Most people don’t get the irony of that oft-quoted line from Henry VI, Part II. The point in “kill[ing] all the lawyers,” is of course to remove the effective rule of law in order to advance the plot against the king. The last thing you may want to see in the mail is a letter from a lawyer threatening suit, but the first person whose competent advice you will seek in such a case is, of course, a lawyer. I suspect the general animus and fear of lawyers is the same as with dentists; that they charge a lot of money for what seems (on the surface) to be a nominal amount of effort on something most would rather not think too much about but aren’t remotely competent to perform on their own, and visits to both are associated with discomfort, irritation, and a lot of waiting.
That’s ridiculous. The starting wage at a McDonald’s in NYC is less than $8/hr, and I doubt there’s anyone making more than $10. Even working 7 days a week, 18 hours a day, a lawyer would have to pull down only $65,000/yr to make so little per hour. I don’t believe there’s any “national law firm” that pays associates so poorly, and I doubt that anyone works at that pay level for half that many hours every week, all year. I agree, though, that $120,000 sounds less impressive when you’re working 80 hours a week.
I also agree that class-action law needs reform. I don’t think restricting punitive damages is the way to go, though. The abuse in the system does lie, in this case, in the lawyers’ compensation. It’s ridiculous to award damages to a class of thousands, yet hand over a third of it to one lawyer. I don’t know how you’d fairly limit it, but there’s gotta be something.
Well, the discussion leads me to believe that we need a massive rewrite of our legal system.
Something that worked well in AD 1200 probably is not that great for the 21st century.
I also think that this country spends entirely too much resources on its legal processes, with pretty poor results.
Take the OJ Simpson trial-months of time and millions of $ spent-for what?
Or these class-action lawsuits-which enrich lawyers while returning nothing to the victims.
I have to admit that I’m no legal historian but what little I know about how 13th century law worked in England tells me it’s radically different from how it works in the 21st century United States.
Sorry, it’s not really fair to take the OJ Simpson trial as an example of how our legal system works or doesn’t work across the board. Most cases just aren’t like the OJ case.
You seem to have no idea what you are talking about.
As someone who works for a “white shoe” consulting/accounting firm providing advisory services to other white shoe corporate clients, I can tell you that the corporate litigation you are referring to are enormously expensive because they are enormously complicated. They often require the expert opinions of armies of highly educated, highly experienced people and they involve settlements in the tens or hundreds of millions of dollars or more.
And how do you think you are going to “introduce true competition” and why? Is there a shortage of lawyers, bankers, accountants and management consultants in the world? Or is it your desire to create a shortage by instituting a salary cap?
Now if you will excuse me, I have to take a shit in my solid gold toilet.
Capping lawyer incomes might or might not be useful, but only within the context of a huge overhaul of our regulatory system in the face of the economic debacle that unregulated capitalism has created.
We don’t need a piecemeal solution to our societal woes, we need to think hard about questions like, "How can capitalism be regulated so that it offers easy entry for newcomers and prevents established firms from shutting newcomers out of the market with regulator barriers? How can we prevent bankers and investors from gaming the system? Should require that SOME kind of real value has to be created before the marketplace rewards people and corporations? Etc., etc.
This will likely never happen, and you can see the reason why in this very thread: the very people who were touting the benefits of the invisible hand of the marketplace and opposing regulation prior to the crash we just went through, are now declaring that nothing can be done to control anyone’s salaries, that any attempt to regulate or control economic activity is doomed to failure, totally oblivious to the obvious point that not regulating economic actifvity – quite vigorously – is doomed to failure.
It never ceases to amaze me how eager some people are to volunteer away their basic freedoms so long as it someone else’s freedoms they are talking about.
I tend to think plumbers make too much money and they don’t add enough to society. My god, many of the plumbing contractors in my area made mid six figures salaries for doing nothing more than bidding on jobs and ordering supplies. If the government stepped in they could certainly make the system of hiring a plumber a lot more fair. Let’s get on that shall we?
Read** Stranger On A Train’s **quote above. :rolleyes:
With more regulation?
Regulatory barriers typically do shut newcomers out of industries. Most new industries start out as the Wild West. But as companies become established, they push for greater controls and certifications and other requirements under the guise of “consumer protection”.
OJ’s criminal trial took months of time because the prosecutors (who make modest salaries) took a trial that could have been presented in 3 weeks and turned it into a 4 month trial. I’m sure many lawyers learned from that, but it doesn’t advance the OP’s argument that lawyers salaries should be capped.
As a lawyer, I’m aware that I make a great deal of money. I’m okay with that. I only make money if my clients achieve verdicts or settlements that are significant. I try not to be too idealistic about it all, or hide behind “doing well while doing good,” but I have been told that some corporations have changed the way they do business as the result of jury verdicts our firm has obtained. Changed in a way that benefits the the public.
I’m not embarrassed about my income. I live well, support my children, give time and money to charities, and work hard for my clients. I know many, many lawyers who also work hard, do great things, are highly skilled, and really don’t make enough money. I propose a minimum income level for attorneys, that might level the playing field.
Of course. The limit on what people should have to pay in compensation should not be the damage they have caused, but instead an arbitrary level set by people with no access to the facts of the situation. That’s a recipe for justice.
