If it is omnipresent enough and too expensive to defer everyone had to practice some law then.

People will not even pay a $1500 for an independent review of a $1million home purchase. Most just blindly follow their real estate agent's advice even though such agents are usually hopelessly conflicted because of their own financial interest in getting the deal done.

If you think there's an honest chance that a $1500 independent review could turn up something that would make you turn down the deal and try to find another, do you then expect to have another $1500 review done? What expectation should you, a non-expert in doing this kind of calculation, have about the total cost of having independent reviews done?

Also, $1500/$1million sounds tiny, but nobody who thinks they can't afford a $1500 review buys a $1million house in cash; they get a mortgage and expect to pay $4.5k/month, and people in general don't save (or have the ability to save) as much as I do/would. So it's $1500/$4500 in the immediate future of having to make your first payment, on top of closing costs, etc., for benefit that is already unclear to a non-expert.

And by definition we're talking about a non-expert, because that's why they would have the need to hire a lawyer to do an independent review.

Anyway, it's not that I necessarily think lawyers are that expensive across the board, but the existence of that perception shouldn't be very confusing. A non-expert doesn't have the tools to accurately put a value on expert services.

So, in that case, it would be to the best interest of the seller to reduce their asking price and/or fix the major problems that were found, so that they no longer have to carry this legal burden going forward.

Yes, this happened to me and my wife (she's the lawyer in the family), and this resulted in us getting over $12,000 cut off the purchase price of our house, in addition to getting a number of major problems fixed before the deal actually went through.

IANAL myself, and I can't make any claims that anyone else will necessarily benefit in the same way, but that detailed inspection of the house-to-be-bought can be worth 10x the cost you pay for it -- or more.

Depending on the discovered issues, if any, your offer may be voidable or in a worse case you will have to forgo your earnest money. Still better than losing the whole house years later because of something like an incorrectly handled DIY divorce.

As I understand it, the title company reviews and insures everything related to the title. And the Purchase and Sale agreement is a standard form contract. What would a buyer need a lawyer to review?

A title company's promise to insure real property titles/deeds comes with many (sometimes pages) of exceptions or disclaimers that depend on the state of the title history. Stuff they don't understand (confused records, muddled divorce/death histories, old easements, etc.) they will disclaim from the coverage.

Title companies provide a several page title commitment that describes the state of the world as they see it and given that state-of-the-world they craft and issue a policy. They don't guarantee against things not included in the title commitment they disclaim them away.

In most cases, especially in developed urban areas, the default works. But if there are edge conditions, the title policy often doesn't fix them because the policy disclaims around them.

But if you read and understand the title commitment and trace the title history yourself (or hire lawyer to do so), you can challenge the title company to remove unwanted disclaimers or add additional protections before you close. Also, you can identify potential chain of title issues and have the seller fix them before closing.

edit: s/misstated/overstated/

It definitely didn't feel like a bargain, but so much of what you are paying for is the knowledge of what needs to be filled, when, maintaining the case docket, serving discovery, filing motions, etc. and all of these can be incredibly puzzling for someone not familiar with proceedings of the court.

You don't HAVE to use Wilson and $onsini to look at incoming NDAs, for example.

The whole point of writing fair form contracts is to remove legal burden when deals get done, without compromising the outcome or the rights of either party.

It's true that VCs have close relationships with certain white shoe law firms, so legal costs can be high when closing rounds of financing. Grumble about it, for sure. Consider it a tax on the money you raise. But don't fall into the trap of thinking that same law firm is "your lawyers," and you can't get help from other lawyers.

My point is that if your guild is entrusted with monopoly power by the government, the guild's behavior must be held to a higher standard (work must be in the public's interest, not in the guild member's individual interest). Unfortunately this point seems to be lost in modern culture.

Non-lawyers who represent themselves in court don't stumble because of a sinister conspiracy by lawyers to trip them up. They stumble because law is a really complicated subject, and no matter how smart you are it's impossible to replace years of full-time learning with a little reading on the side.

The saying "a man who is his own lawyer has a fool for a client" is hundreds of years old.

Put another way: nobody individually profits when the law is made simple and clear.

If you want to have rule of law relying on simple laws just doesn't cut it most of the time.

Now, legalese can and should be reduced, modern lawyers are working on that. But laws will always be used to enforce/define complex systems or relationships. This often requires complex rules.

I do see how the application of simple law is complex. But that complexity could be seen as a trade-off. I'm willing to have a reasonable amount of injustice in exchange for simplifying the application of the law.

The people experiencing such injustice are not willing, and violently so.

Having been through a 2 year legal battle myself, I can tell you that the complexity is there for a reason, and that reason is lawyers arguing a client's case, the court reconsidering their previous opinion, and hopefully a more fair outcome going forward. The world is far more complex than we can imagine, otherwise we'd be able to write perfect, simple laws.

Let me give you a challenge: Say my wife and I are getting a divorce, and we are splitting up community property. I have options and RSUs (any equity asset on a vesting schedule really) that I was awarded before we were married, some that were awarded after, some awarded before that vested after our date of separation. These all have different vesting schedules, strike prices, and hypothetical future value (stock might tank, might leave before it all vests, etc). What is a simple law to determine what dollar value I owe my ex for her interest in this community property?

For instance in your divorce question: why not excercise everything at the date of divorce and split the proceeds 50/50? Is that outrageous? Or simple?

What if one of the parties doesn't want to sell the stock, or it doesn't make sense because the stocks are currently underwater (but may not be at some future date)? What if many of the assets in question are Restricted Stock Units, with no agreed upon value since they cannot be priced until they are released?

"Just sell it all and split it 50/50! DUH!" is not something that works in the real world, where the law is meant to operate.

You think hanging them up from yardarms would deter them?

You want to ensure proper behavior; you have to take away the tools that let them aggregate power in the first place; and prevent it from re-occurring.

There is no "higher" standard. There is only one standard; functional, competent, accountable, just.

If you don't have a legal system that can accomplish those. Then you need to scrap your legal system. Not "hold them to a higher standard", which often is just an escape clause for preferential treatment ("Chevron deference").

It is not an accident that the GINI coefficient, is so drastically out of whack in the US.

The mortgage system, was meant to break the original land grants (which had to be honored under British-American common law).

The corporation both a shield for the rich; and a sword against the middle-classes as it disenfranchises citizens from the bill of rights.

Intellectual property is just a more extreme form of corporations. The notion that idea can be owned for decades, with the cost of enforcement out-sourced to the public, and private profits insourced.

Same with the public schooling system (ready workers). Etc.

Just about every Western institution ("improvement") you'ld care to name, has an ulterior motive moving us one step further along to what amounts to perpetual slavery.

I think if you sent back a person from this era, 120+ years ago, to try and "improve" the American system, they'ld have burned him alive. Such is the level of degradation inherent in todays "modern" governance.

I've seen this first hand, as I had a brutal two year long divorce case, and in spending time with my attorney, got to see many opportunities for technology to improve their jobs. I actually wrote some Python to calculate something called the Hug/Nelson formula to figure out community property interest in options/RSUs. I was really surprised that nothing existed to do this for me, and even played with the idea of making an app to sell to lawyers, because they are seeing more and more divorce cases with these types of assets being split. But where to start? How do you "certify" something to the degree that a lawyer will trust it? It's a huge market potential I think, but the status quo seems pretty entrenched.

But there's nothing like seeing an expert walk into a situation where a bunch of amateurs are squabbling, and seeing the expert just take over the situation. Expertise is still supremely valuable, even if it's unfashionable.