Why would you think it is arbitrarily set by people with no access to the facts of the situation? They don’t just pull numbers out of thin air. Lawyers actually pay experts to calculate damages in law suits.
You’re talking about two different things: class actions and personal injury lawsuits. Sure, they often overlap, but every P.I. lawyer isn’t filing class actions and every class action isn’t about personal injury. An accident case (like a slip and fall or a car accident) isn’t very likely to be a class action. The big personal injury class action cases are product liability cases. The “class” in class action is a class of plaintiffs that is proceeding against a single or set of defendants on the same theory in one consolidated case. It’s complicated procedurally.
Again, different things. No “white shoe” firm in the US pays less than six figures to a starting associate.* Hence Nametag’s calling out Stranger friend’s story. It was ridiculous. If your friend was a consumer bankruptcy lawyer, then he was most likely in what is referred to as a commodity practice. The owners of these types of firms make a lot, but the associates tend not to. I say this as a corporate bankruptcy lawyer at a mid-size firm in a mid-size market. We start our associates (in all practice groups) at $120,000. We do not give out BMWs.
*You can verify this at any number of websites like abovethelaw.com or one of the daily reports. Because these firms hire in batches and comepte direclty, starting salaries are made public. It’s also a bit of a dick-measuring tool.
I know. I was using a touch of sarcasm directed at someone who suggested capping damages. Caps on damages are set with no access to the facts of the situation.
I sounds like you’re bitching about the huge fees generated by large PI/class action suits. Which has no effect on making lawyers fees competitive. However, what will help to make legal help accessable to poor people who need real help would be to do away with unauthorized practice of law rules.
I have been a bankruptcy paralegal for 12 years. I have worked on every kind of case, and work in a firm where I do a lot of decision making. The lawyers depend on me to know the law, the procedures and to make these decisions independently.
The average fee in my area for a simple Chapter 7 case is $1200. That $1200 is very hard for the Debtor to come up with, and a lot of times they remain in trouble because they can’t come up with that fee. Legal aid services are swamped, and all the lawyers would go out of business if they were required to do these things for free.
I could easily prepare and file your case, deal with Motions and objections, etc., and I would know when your problems are such that you need a lawyer. And, since I don’t have $150K in law school debt, I could do it for $300. But because of the the rules against unauthorized practice, you don’t have that option.
That is the biggest way lawyers stifle competition, and regular people suffer because of it.
There is a group of practitioners that are hideously underpaid: criminal defense lawyers that work by court appointment, or as members of a formal Public Defenders office.
When I last checked the fee caps, years after I left the trade, the deal was: defending someone charged with first degree murder – a felony for which the penalty is life in prison – the MOST you could earn on a single case was $1,235. That’s in the year 2000, mind you. $1,235 for defending a case of first-degree murder. If you spent a woeful two weeks working on the case – and that includes prep time as well as trial time – you’d earn about fifteen dollars per hour. A more realistic 160 hours gets us nicely below the eight dollar figure mentioned in the OP.
I have been offended by how much lawyers make in class action suits. They take millions while the people who have been harmed get a pittance. I would not mind looking into that.
The Florida legislature has passed several caps on attorneys’ fees as a percentage of awards in no-fault proceedings; the state SC has ruled them unconstitutional each time.
Look at you, feathering your own nest again! 
To be honest, judges are looking much more closely at class action settlements to prevent this. The days of the coupon settlements appear to be over, though who knows what will happen.
The problem is, the very nature of class actions makes this situation likely. They often occur in situations where individuals have suffered small losses, of low enough import that it would not be economical for them to sue on their own. One I was a member of the class involved my car having 1 hp less than it was advertized as having. No way I am going to sue alone on that. However, the damages to each individual in such a situation are also incredibly small - hence the people harmed get the “pittance” and the lawyers, who have done large amounts of work on the case, get a sum that seems high in comparison to what any individual plaintiff gets.
There’s room for reform, obviously, but it is important not to throw the baby out with the bathwater on class action suits.
Perhaps more importantly, there’s no obligation for those eligible for class-action settlement/judgment proceeds to accept them.
If you got screwed and you want more than the $35 everyone else is getting, you’re perfectly free to file suit on your own. You just have to turn down the $35.
Once upon a time I did some consumer work in a boutique firm. I have and still represent trustee’s in bankruptcy extensively. I have no doubt that you could handle a relatively simple case. Some of the biggest foul-ups I have seen in my ten years come from “petition preparers.” If you want to practice law, go to law school and take the bar. It doesn’t have to cost $150,000. I attended a top tier law school, paid for it all with borrowed money and only owed $45,000 when I was done, with 30 years to repay. It was a state school though.
But why? Why force anyone to take on debt and spend time when they don’t need to? If I had grown up helping my dad with the plumbing, I could hang out a shingle to be a plumber. What’s so special about “the law”?
. . .and if I grew up working in my dad’s doctor’s office, I could just hang out a shingle to be a doctor. No I couldn’t. Same general reasons. There is a degree of trust placed in the bar that would be compromised (further) by unlicensed practitioners. A lawyer screws up bad enough or often enough and his license gets pulled. Belive it or not, it’s not protectionsm for lawyers. It’s protectionism for clients.
I disagree. With the access to information available today, word of mouth would put a crappy “paralawyer” out of business long before the State Bar gets around to putting a crappy lawyer out of business. I’ve seen many a BPP put out of business, and it wasn’t by sanctions, it was because they did a crappy job.
I know too many lawyers to believe that anyone should place a degree of trust in the bar. Most people believe lawyers are shysters, anyway.
Word of mouth? The most successful plaintiffs’ firms around here are staffed by the worst lawyers.
To go back to this statement–What do you propose replacing it with?
My impression from this thread (without meaning anything about you as a person) is that you are confused about how the current system works. That is why I’d like to know how you propose to make it “better”----it’s easy to argue rewriting the system, but rewriting is of no value if the alternatives offered are no better.
Also, for people talking about income caps–what you really need is legal fee caps. Many lawyers are either solo practitioners, or their incomes are directly related to their billings----so you can’t limit their incomes without directly limiting how they can bill clients.
Two points: it’s easy to figure out the right “price” for a simple bankruptcy. The work you need to do, and the skill needed seems to my non-lawyer mind to be fairly pretty much the same in most cases. But how about a corporate merger? What about complex vs. simple litigation? If you’re going to fix legal fees–the price for legal services, you need to define what factors should make legal advice cost more, and how much more it should be priced at. I think you are underestimating how hard it will be to define what the prices should be-- the services offered differ widely from lawyer to lawyer, case to case.
Second, (as many others have said) interfering in how two people price a transaction when dealing at arm’s length seems pretty intrusive to me.
What is a BPP?
I disagree that we should rely on “word of mouth” to weed out the incompetent non-licensed practitioners for the same reason I don’t think we should rely on "word of mouth” to weed out the non-licensed practicing physicians.
And if “word of mouth” would effectively weed out incompetent non-licensed practitioners, why doesn’t it do so now? How is it that incompetent non-licensed practitioners are able to leave a path of destruction before they’re caught and prosecuted? Why didn’t the market step in before the law had to? Your word of mouth approach leaves the most vulnerable (the uneducated and uninformed) prey to the non-licensed “shyster.”*
*That most people believe lawyers are shysters is compelling evidence of nothing? Don’t most people believe in creationism, too?
Earlier I reffered to the area of law you work in - consumer bankruptcy- as “commodity work.” It is on the whole pretty straightforward from a day to day practice standpoint. It is also overrun with pitfalls for the unwary, uneducated do-it-yourselfer and the know-it-all “paraprofessional.” What’s odd, is that in your first post, you seem to be aware of this:
So if any old body could hang out a shingle then who gets the “problems” you now pass to the lawyers?
and you know what, if debtors went to their local bankruptcy district’s website and read some things, read the bankruptcy code, and download the fillable PDFs they could file their own bankruptcy - the clerks office will even file your ECF for pro se debtors in my district.
so exactly what value do you add for your 300 bucks?
A good paralegal knows when to ask the question of a lawyer, at least in my office. So if I ran into a particularly knotty problem with a preference payment, or an issue with means testing I didn’t know the answer to, then I would refer them to a lawyer I know and trust. At that point, paying for specific legal advice would be a fair practice, since it requires in depth legal knowledge.
bankruptcy petition preparer - i.e. a non-attorney who fills out bankruptcy petitions.