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Comment by ergothus | Hacker News Reader

My (now) ex-wife was a law student graduating in 2002. IIRC, that year had far more students than jobs, and the rumors from 2003 (from other friends in the school) were even worse, so I think the job situation predates the 2008 wall street issues.

I've often wondered about the disconnect: How do we have too many lawyers, and yet legal services are still too expensive? To a degree, there IS a correction underway - prepaid legal services are far more common than they were. In another way, the burden new grads face (massive debt, limited job market, basically no employment during law school) means that many people choose NOT to pursue employment as actual lawyers, so the supply of law school students !== supply of lawyers.

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The biggest reason is that newly barred lawyers are god-awful at doing complicated work. It takes a lot of on the job training to get a lawyer worth anything. So the real market of actual lawyers is pretty restrained by the number of entry level jobs established lawyers hire.

A good 50% of law students are out of law within a couple years, and large number of those never work as a lawyer. It's tough to create your own job because nobody trusts you.

And even if you do work as a lawyer, not all lawyers are fungible. They guy who spends all day at Immigration court can't litigate a contract dispute over a rail line. The guy who writes patents doesn't know how to handle a bankruptcy.

So you can get a guy to do your DUI for 500 bucks, but my firm would charge you 550/hr just to talk to you on the phone.

Another big reason is that law is a very prestige and pedigree heavy industry. Why would a firm hire a Duke grad for 160k, when you can get 4 Brooklyn law school grads for that? Rightly or wrongly, the Brooklyn grads are seen as incapable of doing the job.

Clients then hire the well known firm for their big cases and matters because they have a good reputation.

That is sort of changing. Big companies use smaller firms for smaller matters and cases where spending 700 an hour for legal work doesn't make sense.

Some would argue legal rates aren't even too high. For example, for transaction lawyers, their fees are a fraction of what the investment banker takes on a deal.

But the biggest reason that legal services are expensive is that legal service is man-hour heavy and essentially doesn't scale.

Look at even blue collar services that are manhour heavy like mechanics. A car mechanic costs 80-100 bucks an hour.

What is really need is for the legal system to streamline. As long as it takes 20 hours to do your divorce, it'll never be cheap.

> What is really need is for the legal system to streamline. As long as it takes 20 hours to do your divorce, it'll never be cheap.

The problem is that it's an adversarial process surrounded by politics. As long as human judges and juries are deciding high stakes outcomes on a case by case basis, people who are good at rhetoric and persuasion will be in demand.

What streamlining implies is making outcomes more deterministic so that everybody knows what will happen ahead of time and there is no room to argue about it. But that is fundamentally a political problem. The laws need to be clearer and less complicated.

So it's worth spending a few minutes watching David Boies, one of the top trial lawyers in the country, depose Bill Gates: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tYLBA1Ldq6M. He's no great orator. He's got an affable midwestern affect, but mostly he sounds like a college professor.

Winning cases has little to do with rhetoric, or conventional persuasiveness. Almost nothing goes to trial, so the audience is almost always a judge and his or her staff, who aren't persuaded by rhetoric. What they are persuaded by is clear, straightforward application of what is almost always pretty simple law to extremely complex factual scenarios.

Imagine a couple breaking up, and your being asked to decide whose fault it was. Think of the extended, factually-intensive drag-out fights two people can have over something as simple as a relationship gone sour. Two years ago, he got her a gift for her birthday, but did he pick it up on the way home from work because he forgot to buy it ahead of time? Did he remember her birthday or did he forget? Is he really an uncaring inattentive boyfriend? That's litigation, except with many more people involved, much more complicated scenarios, and potentially a lot of money at stake.

> What they are persuaded by is clear, straightforward application of what is almost always pretty simple law to extremely complex factual scenarios.

If the law requires consideration of extremely complex factual scenarios then it isn't simple law. Laws that look simple because they use words like "reasonable", aren't.

Creating simple, just laws is hard. But progress can be made by not attempting to adjudicate intractable quagmires like "fault" in a divorce.

Making simple laws by simply ignoring the complexity of the real world won't solve people's actual problems.

It isn't the role of the courts to micromanage people. Judges are not marriage counselors.

Civil courts are primarily tasked with deciding the most just disposition of assets. But the most just disposition of assets is not giving them to the lawyers. To have a just outcome the amount spent on resolving the dispute has to be much smaller than the amount in controversy. If the law doesn't do that then it would be more just to flip a coin or split the difference.

But splitting the difference isn't "right" either, it's only better than the "very wrong" we have in many cases now. You can get closer than that to the ideal outcome of perfect dispute resolution at zero cost. There are rules that produce significantly-better-than-random outcomes at low cost, and those are the ones the law should use, even if the decisions are somewhat less optimal than the ones that come at unjustifiably high cost.

I reject your assertion that the legal process is sucking up too large a percentage of the disputed assets in question. In general legal fees and court costs are a relatively small percentage of the disputed value.

Nobody is complaining about those cases. The vast majority of disputes never even make it inside a courtroom because many laws are clear and simple. If you have a good law then nobody ever talks about it, or needs to.

What people want to change are the areas where the law is a mess. Divorce, patent litigation, etc. Laws that criminalize innocuous behavior and allow prosecutors to overcharge defendants at whim. And a common characteristic with these messes is that spending a lot of money on lawyers will significantly improve outcomes, so that people who can, have to -- or they get screwed. Which is what happens to the people who can't.

Thank you for the very entertaining link.

The following is not particularly a disagreement with the overall intent of your comment; it's largely a tangent.

Perhaps, as a non-lawyer, I'm missing what's actually going on in that conversation, but it seems to me that just in those 10 minutes, a lot of airtime is being spent on rhetorical manoeuvring and persuasion.

The main example here involves the very idea of using a dictionary as some kind of authority. It's nonsense to suppose that a dictionary is anything but alphabetized preposterous oversimplifications. With application to that deposition, we all know that that definition of "operating system" is the sine qua non of what is usually meant by an academic, but that no consumer who goes to buy an "operating system" is expecting to get only resource-management functionality. They expect a shell (CLI shell, GUI shell, or whatever), for example, which by those academic definitions is clearly an application and not part of the OS. It might be a bit silly to next-century-quarterback someone as smart as WG3, but it seems to me that perhaps he dropped the rhetorical ball under pressure here; I think a more persuasive reply would be something like "there exist contexts in which that's what those words mean, and there are contexts where that is NOT what those words mean". I suspect that'd have been a better rhetorical manoeuvre.

Why does Boies keep mentioning that dictionary is by MS Press? Does he think the audience missed it the first time, or the second time? I suggest it's for some reason involving "conventional persuasiveness".

Once again, I suspect I shoulda gone into law. It just seems so fun. Shitty dress code, though.

That part isn't really an exercise in rhetoric. It's just building a record. Down the line, Boies will have to write some written motion, say for summary judgment (judgment before trial). He wants to be able to use the term operating system without Microsoft pushing back on the definition later. One easy way to do it is to just get Bill Gates to admit to a definition in the deposition. Hard for MS to argue with that.

He mentions the MS Press not for the audience, but for Bill. It makes it harder for him to deny the definition on the spot when it's in Microsoft's own book. Maybe that's conventional persuasion, I don't know. It's not persuasion through stirring oratory.

> What is really need is for the legal system to streamline. As long as it takes 20 hours to do your divorce, it'll never be cheap.

Also lawyers have no incentive to streamline the process. They are all billing by the hour, so the lack of efficiency is passed onto their clients.

> What is really need is for the legal system to streamline. As long as it takes 20 hours to do your divorce, it'll never be cheap.

My fiance is a divorce lawyer, and she basically says this all the time. She's able to work much faster than her much older colleagues simply because she knows how to use Google to look up things and she doesn't depend on a secretary for transcribing things on their PC (I'm not joking). There are so many aspects of the industry that are still in the stone age.

A lawyer can only represent a single entity during any given billable unit. This means the independent lawyer is completely dependent on other individuals for their entire income which must support all of their outlays.

If a lawyer is entitled to the same work schedule (40 hours/week) as everyone else, then those 40 billable hours must be paid enough to support those outlays. That is why legal services are expensive. You are not just paying for a unit of work, but rather, subsidizing a lawyer's entire lifestyle.

And do lawyers typically incur considerable expenses during the course of their business? I guess I'm not really sure what outlays you are talking about.

I think by "outlays" parent was referring to net income, i.e. take home pay plus benefits. There are outlays however. An office for a start. Most likely at least a part-time assistant. Computers/subscriptions to various legal services.

In addition, a 40 hour work week probably translates into something more along the lines of 20 billable hours given the inevitable variation in case load, personal time off for whatever, ongoing education, etc.

Basically, it's the same reason that any consultant-type job (which a small law practice effectively is) has to charge hourly rates that at first blush may seem pretty high just to translate into the equivalent of, say, a $100K salary at a typical corporate job.

Lawyers who bill by the hour generally bill out their paralegals and administrative staff as well, at proportionally lower rates. So it's not just lawyers who are billing much of their time.

Mortgage/rent/utilities, food, clothing, transportation, etc.

Probably similar to your outlays.

Clothing, office, status are all more expensive than for say a programmer. A lawyer, to get clients, must "look successful." And a clever t-shirt costs a whole lot less than a discount suit.

Heck, I know of people that rely on swag to provide them with Tshirts for life.

As a work from home programmer/IT guy, I can definitely relate with swag as work wear. I make it a rule to be dressed decently while working (cause frequent video conferencing/meetings) but I'm not going to put any more dollars into it than I need to until and unless I have to leave the house.

Lexis-Nexis and Westlaw access are essentially required to look up relevant cases. (to rile your fairness sensibilities, look into how much of a near-monopoly is enjoyed over public info there). That can be, IIRC, thousands/month.

Then, depending on your area of work, you've got issues like software to record and cite websites, continuing legal education requirements, etc.

Not the most expensive profession in terms of base costs, but not cheap either.

Lawyers who bill their time by the hour also bill their Lexis/Nexis or Westlaw fees back to their client.

Annual licensing fees (state bar fees) and professional liability insurance are things that programmers don't pay for* but lawyers do.

*Some programmers have insurance but not to the extent that lawyers are required to have it.

Offtopic, request to viewers:

Please don't downvote without explaining why, responding, etc. I'm not asking you to debate the OP which you desire to downvote, but to simply explain why. Feel free to preface it with "I'm not going to debate you, or even reply to you, but here is why i downvoted you:"

My reason for wishing this is, in areas that another viewer (myself, in this example) is unfamiliar with the topic at hand (law, lawyers, and etc) - a downvote can often be confusing. Is what the OP said non-factual? Are they bending the truth? Or is it simply a hot topic?

Anyway, i could go on, but i'll likely end up wandering. Thanks for reading.

I think this is something that Digg got right (at some point, I believe). You had to submit some reason why you were burying a post. I would perhaps go farther and require the user to provide a free-text answer of a minimum character/word length to register a downvote.

You actually seem to be getting downvoted. I don't know what to call that...

Some classification of irony, I'm sure.

This is why I almost always automatically upvote posts that were downvoted away....

You can't just charge what your credit card bill and rent add up to. The market doesn't work like that.

Yes, a persistent lawyer will have to manage their income and outlays and we must consider the other side of the market.

As income rises so do outlays, outlays that can get tied up in ongoing obligations (mortgages, utility bills, car payments, telecommunications services, investment schedules, etc.). The supply side of the market (lawyers) quickly have incentives to be paid more for the same or less hours of work: so that they can support more outlays (kids, hobbies, greater projected retirement fund returns, etc).

Of course, clients can just take their money and cut off the inflow to lawyers as you suggest; it is a definite risk.

there's a big difference between having a law degree, and passing the bar+practicing for years. the latter is what keeps the supply artificially low.

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