What I think these anecdotes raise, and where it differs from my own experiences with the law, is the "Big Show" of litigation. Especially where jurors, witnesses, or court observers are involved - it's some fractional part of the equation to be 100% correct. It might even be completely irrelevant. Compare the best "I won this litigation" story with the best "I got this case settled" story and I think the odds are clearly in settlement's favor that everyone ended up better off - because you succeeded without turning it into some carnival show of justice.

I practice a type of law where I hope I never have a hearing or go before a judge. No one ever told me in law school this was the type of practice I could be one day doing (although if I had taken the right class - Admin Law, it might have seemed a possibility). My practice is almost entirely by fax (and hopefully one day soon some technology from this century). I advocate best by putting pen to paper, well fingers to keyboard, and connecting the dots in a way that someone can read it and say "that makes all the sense in the world, looks like your client should win." Of course, I'm not so naive to be it operates 100% like that but it's how I get to operate my practice and it means I get to really enjoy my work and feel fulfilled.

Here's the shocker - I'm writing to the VA (Veteran's Administration).

EDIT - Caveat - I would still totally leave to start a software company to improve the legal profession. Been teaching myself code for the last couple years and love to just mess around in my spare time. I just wouldn't be leaving because I was disgruntled but because it's a better opportunity.

What I find about lawyers is that they often seem to create conflict where there is none or inflame conflict where it already exists, to set themselves up as the savior. A very simple example of this was the first time I bought a house, everything was very cordial up until the moment lawyers got involved to review the closing documents. Suddenly everything was an argument, with no ground given until the other party gave up something. In retrospect it was really just seemed to be the lawyers justifying their presence.

This is actually a serious problem. There are plenty of things you can put into a major contract that will have the effect of transferring e.g. $10,000 in value from one party to the other. Or you could just flat out argue over the price. And both parties might still agree to the contract either way.

The issue is that it's economically advantageous to pay a lawyer anything up to $5000 in fees if the result will be a 50% chance that you can net $10,000. So the parties could collectively pay the lawyers $10,000 to argue over who should get $10,000, even assuming everyone is acting rationally and has substantially accurate information.

The waste of resources is inherent to the adversarial process. It's in the same nature as a war but fought with money and time rather than blood. It's the same calculus: The fight is very rarely worth the cost but if you have no soldiers you're a victim to someone who does.

My guess is that it's less dishonesty -- though no doubt that occurs -- but far more often there never was an agreement. The two parties thought they had one but it wasn't fully specified, and now they have discovered that the two sets of unspecified assumptions in their heads don't match.