But legal services in general are an expensive, labor-intensive craft industry. Just like any craft industry, there's probably scope for low-touch industrialization alongside high-end bespoke craftmanship. Clothing is a good example of what I'm talking about--rich people have tailors, everyone else buys off the rack. What you have now in law and may other professions only works for the high-touch case.
Atrium (google them) is trying to get around this by having a traditional high-touch law firm use a lot of software provided by a standard silicon valley-financed venture capital startup. They're basically laundering legal fees to the startup side via the law firm. I'm not sure of the exact legalities but we need more stuff like this.
Access matters. A system that, for completely well-intentioned reasons, attempts to guarantee that everyone only gets the best, means the low end will never have access at affordable rates. It's simple economics. Until practitioners work for free (they won't), or there's some way to do things more cheaply, the bottom won't get served.
For the same reason or not-reason you can have any other company owned by people who are not experts in the company’s subject. This is probably good for lawyers but otherwise this restriction makes no sense.
This is very different from the chip engineer scenario. It is the most important reason why non-lawyers are not allowed to own law firms. Because non-lawyers are not bound by rules that require them to put profit motives second in many circumstances.
The McKenzie Friend rules says if you proceed pro se you can nevertheless have somebody who may or may not be trained as a lawyer present to help you by taking notes, prompting, and giving advice not so different from the way a lawyer might use assistants.
You have to do all the actual talking, most weight is on your shoulders - you can't use this to basically keep all the advantages of pro se (courts give people proceeding on this basis more leeway because they may not know and understand the rules a lawyer must master) while having a lawyer do everything, but you can at least have somebody to help you and it can be someone legally trained.
In the UK this principle is named for a Mr McKenzie who lost a divorce case because the lawyer sent to try to assist him after he lost funding for a "real" lawyer wasn't qualified to appear in front of that court (an Australian lawyer, in an English court), and the court reasoned that lawyer was thus prohibited from attending except to sit in the public gallery. On appeal a higher court concluded that nothing clearly prohibited this lawyer being present as "a friend" of McKenzie and so that's the McKenzie Friend rule.
Since they aren't a "real" lawyer it can be a paralegal working for cheap, somebody who has done a year's law school and dropped out, or even just your actual friend who is better at reading and thinking than you are. It all helps.