He said a good lawyer, not an average one. If one cannot tell the difference when choosing between a good and an average (or worse) attorney, then there is very little chance that they will do an adequate job with self-research, either.
What's the difference in cost between learning to discriminate between good lawyers and bad lawyers, and learning to avoid egregious legal errors on your own?
Having watched the back on forth on many contract reviews, "just DIY the contract review" is perilously bad advice. Thankfully, nobody gave it. You can DIY your company formation; the biggest risk you run is that you'll botch equity structure, but a lot of people don't care about that issue right away.
IP and liability type stuff is another one I'd probably DIY, at least early on. I have a small sample size (and have never hired a lawyer for that purpose myself), but everyone I know who's hired an lawyer for early-stage consulting on IP or liability risks more or less paid money to hear back, "everything you're doing is probably illegal, oh and you should plaster disclaimers everywhere".
Part might be a product/purchaser mismatch. I think what most people want on such issues is not purely legal advice, but integrated legal/business/technical advice, where someone who might primarily be a lawyer, but is also knowledgeable in the other areas, gives you balanced advice on how to mitigate your legal risks, within the technical and business constraints you also face. But people with such knowledge are fairly rare (and expensive), so it's more common to get very conservative legal advice that just points out that your product or service is a legal minefield (as most are).
Depends on how much you value your own time and your risk-aversion.
You should have your own boilerplate contracts reviewed too. This will not cost $9000.
I'm not so sure about this. The average lawyer is someone practising in that area (otherwise why did you hire them and why are they working for you? your friend? presumably you hired someone working in the area) and that person is someone with at the very least a few courses under their belt from law school and in Canada, 10 months of articling with another lawyer. There is a very good chance that they know a fair bit about the area and I would expect it to be considerably better than what you'd come up with even in many hours of research. Law school does teach you something and lawyers who've worked for even a couple years in an area have learned a lot from working on other people's problems.
Long story short: the average lawyer you'd hire is one who knows a fair bit about the subject matter.
(As the other branch of this thread discusses, I agree that contract review is a different matter; in that case, you want someone who's familiar enough at pattern-matching to spot unusual things or possible pitfalls. But reviewing contracts proposed by other people is one specific kind of lawyer-consultation.)