A one-percenter buying a million-dollar house might well consider it reasonable to hire a lawyer to help out with something as ordinary as a home purchase, but the rest of us aren't buying million-dollar houses and don't routinely get legal advice about anything. When I bought my house, I had $30k to spend as a down payment; no way would it have made sense to waste 5% of that on unnecessary legal work. (What would lawyers have even theoretically been able to tell me, anyway?)