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>The high rates that top lawyers get paid are simply market rates. We pay them too. Cheap lawyers are not a bargain. I wasn't arguing that Google should've used cheaper lawyers -- I believe the costs across the entire legal industry are ridiculously inflated, for multiple reasons. Like health care, there are a lot of elements in play and it's hard to pin any single thing down and say "this is the magic bullet", even though, also like the medical industry, there are a handful of major, easily identifiable "indecencies" in the legal industry. Note also that one can say the current costs of medicine simply represent "the current market rate" and that these services are worth what people are paying for them (and in medicine, that's more likely to be true than legal services, though the exorbitance there isn't justified either). By "decency and propriety", I guess I mean "someone whose perspective is such that a fair analysis of the real value of the services provided by lawyers can be assessed", i.e., from the perspective of a basic decent person. I understand this perspective can become foggy as one accustoms to the rates commonly charged by legal professionals, or worse, becomes a legal professional themselves, without necessarily losing decency in the general sense -- it is just that this person's "decency gland" (as it pertains to the price of lawyers) has been forced into submission in order to retain and/or provide a significant amount of legal services. Yes, I think a "proper rate" for legal work would be less than the $250/hr baseline that all of the attorneys in my area charge, just as I think a proper rate for the stitch-up of a cut should be less than the $3,300 an uninsured friend was recently charged (for him, over a month of wages. He spent less than two hours in the ER). |