To expand on this, as a non-lawyer who pays lawyers, I absolutely refuse to sign anything under California law which doesn't have to be. The courts take three to 4 times longer than Delaware's [1], there are a bunch of BS rules you have to spend ten pages having both parties mutually agree to exculpate from their proceedings and the lawyers, given all this and the difficulty of the exam, are a time and a half as expensive as New York's.

[1] "For fiscal year 2014, the average elapsed from filing to disposition [for the Delaware Supreme Court] was only 154.2 days, and the average elapsed time from submission to disposition was only 27.3 days" [a]. Meanwhile, in California, the median time to process an appeal, statewide, is 518 days, ranging from 423 in Ventura to 693 in Sacramento [b].

[a] http://courts.delaware.gov/AOC/docs/ACTL-DSBA-Full-Report.pd... pages 2 and 3

[b] http://www.courts.ca.gov/documents/2016-Court-Statistics-Rep... page 28

Outside of that niche, I think California has a rather good body of law. For example, it features strong protections for employee and consumer rights that (in my opinion) other states sorely need.

I don't know which "bunch of BS rules" you're referring to specifically, but it's true that California tends to require greater notice when a party is waiving important statutory rights in a written agreement. I doubt that the few bits of bold text or extra signature lines (which are already in every practitioner's standard templates) are what you're really complaining about.

California may have a good body of law, but taking three to 4 times longer to litigate means it costs, cetris paribus, three to 4 times more to defend your contracts. That greatly benefits deep-pocketed litigants (and contract breachers).

Former big firm lawyer here. This is definitely not true across the board. In the firm I worked at, we had three "rates": reduced, normal, and New York. The NY rate was only charged by NY lawyers, or by other lawyers working on matters for NY lawyers (typically for NY clients, who would put up with it).

It may be that small-firm lawyers are much less expensive in NY, but I would doubt that this is the case. If you're comparing upstate NY to SF, you'll see a big difference, due to cost of living. But compare upstate NY to Sacramento, and the difference would not be anywhere close to 1.5x.

Note that the bills with these same firms reach parity with New York the moment I insist we use Delaware or New York law.

That is like saying

"Because I wrote this code in Java instead of Go, it cost about 40% more (I had to generate all the getters and setters, added up to 40% more lines of code)"

Legal documents are the highest level copy and paste from previous legal documents. In the same way many code is glue some libraries together, but worse (i.e. more reuse).

There may also be swings in "rack rate" because (1) the partner you are talking to at one firm is hungry and therefore will discount; or (2) some firms discount up front but then hold fast, whereas other firms are more receptive to discounting the bill at the end of the day.