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by udpheaders
5022 days ago
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I'm surprised you would actually take the statistics seriously. At face value, the article is pure entertainment. I would not consider an evaluation of a lawyer as a liability or an asset to be something that can be measured objectively. Every client is different and every client's situation is different. And it is the client who ultiimately decides whether the services are an asset or a liability, and no one else. My opinion is that lawyers do not add anything to the client's bottom line (but it doesn't matter what I think, only what the client thinks). In my view, lawyers function to limit the costs of the client's activities to the client (while at the same time adding to the client's costs themselves with legal fees). In other words, they operate to try to minimize the client's losses, to limit the client's liabilities. But we often have no evidence that such losses would have occurred absent the lawyers' involvement. We resort to speculation. Unfortunatley, lawyers play on fears to generate business. But there are some situations where this is not necessary, because the fears come from a real situation not a hypothetical. In these situations, there is a real, measurable risk of loss. That's why I gave the (extreme) example of facing criminal charges. That's a situation where the losses seem quite imminent. The chance of serious losses is real and the accompanying fears are justified. I would argue society needs enough lawyers to handle those types of situations. Clients with serious problems where loss is imminent. But beyond that, it gets very subjective and very speculative. Needless to say, lawyers are very good at arguing the need for their existence and for their value to the client. Whether it's 40% more than we needed in 1994, more than that or some lesser percentage, is anyone's guess. We all know it's too many. You don't need to conduct a study to see that. |
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Lawyers are the dispute resolution mechanism that allows an economy full of people trying to screw each other (and trust me, as long as economies are full of people, they will be trying to screw each other) to work. The article is based on the reasonable premise that a bigger dispute resolution system contributes to GDP to a point, then starts hurting the economy beyond a certain point.
Note bene: you say "in 1994" as if we should assume the problem has been getting worse over time, but in reality the size of the legal sector as a %-age of real GDP has been decreasing since it peaked in the late 1980's: http://amlawdaily.typepad.com/.a/6a00e55044cbaf883401543574d...