Re:Going to court without a lawyer is new normal for U.S. li...
by AnthonyMouse on Friday November 22, 2019 @05:40PM
(#21610865)
> Hypothesis: the Bar Association is a cartel; limits supply, keeps prices high.
The mechanism is a little different than that. They don't limit the supply, they drive demand by causing attorneys to be risk-averse.
For example, there are questions an attorney might be able to answer off the top of their head and be correct about 99.9% of the time. A low income client may like those odds and be much happier to take them in exchange for getting charged for 15 minutes of time than to have the attorney take two hours to double check the answer. The attorney, however, would answer a thousand questions like that a year and then have even odds of getting one of them wrong and getting disbarred over it. That takes option one off the table. Multiplied by every question the client has, that means the client has to pay for eight times as much lawyer time. Even if it isn't worth paying your lawyer $5000 more to e.g. avoid a 1% probability of a $15,000 penalty.
The mechanism is a little different than that. They don't limit the supply, they drive demand by causing attorneys to be risk-averse.
For example, there are questions an attorney might be able to answer off the top of their head and be correct about 99.9% of the time. A low income client may like those odds and be much happier to take them in exchange for getting charged for 15 minutes of time than to have the attorney take two hours to double check the answer. The attorney, however, would answer a thousand questions like that a year and then have even odds of getting one of them wrong and getting disbarred over it. That takes option one off the table. Multiplied by every question the client has, that means the client has to pay for eight times as much lawyer time. Even if it isn't worth paying your lawyer $5000 more to e.g. avoid a 1% probability of a $15,000 penalty.