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.
