The lawyers themselves are not necessarily to blame. There are two or three interlinked aspects:

1. The growth in regulations, which draws away limited legal resources toward big companies, leaving less (or higher fees) for criminal or civil defense

2. The growth in criminal prosecution of victimless crimes and especially ramping up the war on drugs

3. The collusion between politicians and the prison industry, which has created a monetary incentive to incarcerate people (looking 'tough on crime' has more than just electoral benefits)

Then who else is to blame? Nearly everyone with in the system with significant decision authority is either an active member of the bar or was before they became a politician.

Voters? Perhaps. But usually the choice is between two lawyers.

It's not just a lawyer failure, but a legal system collapse.

So it's entirely relevant to ask if there's a meaningful distinction there.

What is our "legal system" if not primarily a collection of lawyers practicing law and politics?

Very true:

"The American justice system favors the educated, the corporations, and the rich, and takes unfair advantage of the uneducated, the private citizen, and the poor. It would seem that almost any legal entanglement can be resolved through the judicious application of money, while almost any tussle with the law can result in financial penalties and even imprisonment for those who are forced to rely on public defenders. Many people naïvely believe that a criminal is someone who commits a criminal act. This is not true, at least not in the American system of justice. Here, a criminal is someone who has been accused of committing a criminal act, tried for it, and found guilty. Whether or not that person has in fact committed the act is immaterial: witnesses may lie, evidence can be fabricated, juries can be manipulated. A person who has committed a criminal act but has not been tried for it, or has been tried and exonerated, is not a criminal, and for anyone to call him a criminal is libelous. It therefore follows that, within the American justice system, committing a crime and getting away with it is substantially identical to not committing a crime at all. Wealthy clients have lawyers who are constantly testing and, whenever possible, expanding the bounds of legality. Corporations have entire armies of lawyers, and can almost always win against individuals. Furthermore, corporations use their political influence to promote the use of binding arbitration, which favors them, as the way to resolve disputes. This state of affairs makes it hopelessly naïve for anyone to confuse legality with morality, ethics, or justice. You should always behave in a legal manner, but this will not necessarily save you from going to jail. In what manner you choose to behave legally is between you and your conscience, God, or lawyer, if you happen to have one, and may or may not have anything to do with obeying laws. Legality is a property of the justice system, while justice is an ancient virtue. This distinction is lost on very few people: most people possess a sense of justice, and, separate from it, an understanding of what is legal, and what they they can get away with. The U.S. legal system, as it stands, is a luxury, not a necessity. It is good to those who can afford it, and bad for those who cannot. As ever-increasing numbers of people find that they cannot pay what it takes to secure a good outcome for themselves, they will start to see it not as a system of justice, but as a tool of oppression, and will learn to avoid it rather than to look to it for help. As oppression becomes the norm, at some point the pretense to serving justice will be dispensed with in favor of a much simpler, efficient, streamlined system of social control, perhaps one based on martial law. People have been known to get along quite happily without written law, lawyers, courts, or jails. Societies always evolve an idea of what is forbidden, and find ways to punish those who transgress. In the absence of an official system of justice, people generally become much more careful around each other, because running afoul of someone may lead to a duel or give rise to a vendetta, and because, in the absence of jails, punishments tend become draconian, coming to include dispossession, banishment, and even death, which are all intended to deter and to neutralize rather than to punish. When disputes do arise, lay mediators or councils may be appealed to, to help resolve them. The transition to a lower-energy system of jurisprudence will no doubt be quite tumultuous, but there is something we can be sure of: many laws will become unenforceable at its very outset. This development, given our definition of what is criminal, will de facto decriminalize many types of behavior, opening new, relatively safe avenues of legal behavior for multitudes of people, creating new opportunities for the wise, and further tempting the evil and the foolish. As a safety precaution, you might want to distance yourself from the legal system, and, to the extent that this is possible, find your own justice. As an exercise, examine each of your relationships that is based on a contract, lease, deed, license, promissory note, or other legal instrument, and look for ways to replace it with relationships that are based on trust, mutual respect, and common interest. Think of ways to make these relationships work within the context of friendships and familial ties. To protect yourself from getting savaged by the justice system as it degenerates into oppression, try to weave a thick web of informal interdependency all around you, where any conflict or disagreement can be extinguished by drawing in more and more interested parties, all of them eager to resolve it peaceably, and none of them willing to let it escalate beyond their midst. Struggle for impartiality when attempting to mediate disputes, and be guided by your wisdom and your sense of justice rather than by laws, rules, or precedents, which offer poor guidance in changing times."

- From "Thriving in the Age of Collapse" by Dmitry Orlov (https://docs.google.com/Doc?id=dtxqwqr_19gjjvp8)

There's plenty of lawyers out there - but, like in programming, there are a lot fewer good ones. In general, people are willing to pay $500 / hour because they can't find one of similar quality for a lower price.

There's plenty of lawyers out there - but, like in programming, there are a lot fewer good ones. In general, people are willing to pay $500 / hour because they can't find one of similar quality for a lower price.

We still find people representing themselves because they can't "scrape together a retainer". They're not trying to hire $500/hour guys. They'd hire anyone that'd take their case for what they had. The law has become so twisted that its genuinely long, hard work just to get a case together and get in the door. There's a minimum barrier to entry that the average joe just can't meet and the most inexpensive of lawyers can't make a living doing. The work is too much and the people have too little. Its not the lawyers. The whole system is failing. Its just failing from the bottom up. Its only just now effecting the $500/hour level.

If a few poor people here and there end up representing themselves its no big deal. They just operate at a huge disadvantage and get screwed. If most people are forced to represent themselves or go with an overworked public defender the whole system will crack into to very distinct parts.

There's a lot of disagreement around "scope" - some people are actually opposed to almost any restriction of practice, even in areas like medicine and law. Other people want to see similar associations/cartels (depending on your point of view) set up for software development. There's also a big middle ground, people who do see a justification for credentialing and licensing in some cases, but who think that the scope of what requires a license has expanded far beyond what was reasonable and needed to protect the public. I tend to fall in the middle group, but with a high degree of suspicion of cartels.

There's also some funny business on the demand side for law. America's truly byzantine tax code, for instance, provides lots of employment for $500/hr lawyers. Imagine if programmers could mandate that all code had to be written in the most bloated enterprise java possible, and had to be written by people with three year graduate degrees from programs largely inaccessible to international students. This would include many tasks that could otherwise have been handled by smart people with no degree who read the book. Anyone who didn't comply could be prevented by legal force from practicing, or even sent to prison. Now you'd have something comparable to the legal profession.

In the end, law firms tend to trade on longstanding reputation, which is a fine, but imperfect, way of handling this problem. These days, there is no reason to assume that high rates == quality, or vice versa.

The market will sort this out eventually: right now clients are making pricing demands on big law firms that are cutting their margins significantly. As a result, firms are ditching costs in a kind of emergency sale. My own opinion is that many firms are gutting their best assets (their new, young lawyers) in order to preserve the partner profits, and that will be their downfall. Meanwhile, the next generation of lawyers will be free to charge much less, and will actually make more money.

Code and the law kind of do the same thing (which is why we use the same word for it) but the platforms are vastly different.

I'm interpreting this as "why would we need lawyers, we did fine without them", but that is very untrue. In the past there simply was much less rule of law, with the cronyism and systemic state of fear of citizens that follows from it; as is still the case in most of the Third World and especially in places like China and Russia. But to a lesser degree also in Westerns countries in Europe and the US, and especially in places and/or social strata that don't trust the legal system, or where those who are supposed to uphold the law are corrupt.

Lawyers may seem to be a net tax on the system, and the rule of law could theoretically exist without lawyers, true; but history has proven that systems where people have access to specialists who can fight for their rights are more efficient and, more importantly, better to live in than others.

I'm not the author of the post, so I'm not authoritative but that would be my reading.

I've heard the reason described as such:

"People will pay the highest possible amount they can afford for things like doctors and lawyers because if there is a screw up they die or go to jail.

When the stakes are so high you pay the most you possibly can to ensure, to the best of your ability, the best possible outcome for yourself."

Atleast this line of thinking makes sense to me. If I'm ever up on trial for something that could send me to jail, you can bet I'll spend every penny I have to ensure that I'm found innocent.

Agreed. I paid $75/hour to get a lawyer to do the work when we bought our house. I'm not sure why you chose to pay someone that much. Only you can answer that:)

I'm Canadian, living in a large city so i don't think location factors into the lawyers fee's.