"The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers" - it's a lawyer joke
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Dickens, who had his own scars from dealing with the law, said this about their environs:
"These sequestered nooks are the public offices of the legal profession, where writs are issued, judgments signed, declarations filed, and numerous other ingenious machines put in motion for the torture and torment of His Majesty's liege subjects, and the comfort and emolument of the practitioners of the law." (Pickwick Papers)
The unbroken line of criticism over the centuries probably is its own best evidence that there is something seriously broken with our profession - the guild system that renders the services over-priced, the maddening court procedures that just as often work to deny justice as to promote it, the shake-down artists who merely fly the flag of the law while engaging in basic extortion, and on and on.
There is much good in the law, and in many of those who practice it, and it all the sadder therefore that many would pervert that which might otherwise be so well-used.
Of course, what you finish with is true, they are very necessary for our current way of life. Of course, they also ensure that they are more and more necessary, as all good middle men do.
Sure, it's convenient to blame the intermediary, but at the end of the day if people were better at solving their own problems, the attorney's role would be only that of a counselor. (a role that good attorneys embrace.)
Lawyers, as far as I've been able to tell, only get to evaluate contracts every time a suit goes to trial, which is, what, every 10 years or so? And if Bill Clinton is right in challenging what "is" is, then any word's meaning can potentially be modified by any ruling.
The problem may be that the evaluation procedure is so much less straightforward than with running code. We got legalese because colloquial English is an even worse way of specifying precise documents, but I'd love to see law documents become computer programs like financial contracts can be. (See http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/simonpj/Papers... for a particularly elegant example.)
But no, Shakespeare does not depict Jack Cade as a statesman, is he?