Lawyers don't really control their own supply the way doctors do, which is why there is a great overabundance of people with law degrees in the country. AI has actually been used in a number of legal contexts, like building normalized contracts, or paralegal work. It's also because a lot of the highly paid legal work is pretty hard to automate in the same way, because it requires much more understanding of precedent or other nebulous ways of interpretation that AI isn't suited for.

> Lawyers don't really control their own supply the way doctors do

Bar associations do control standards for qualifications and acceptable on-ramp paths which directly governs supply (in fact, the oversupply differs in jurisdictions as a direct result of these decisions).

A key difference is that the legal pipeline isn’t sensitive to federal funding to govern supply of qualified new lawyers the way the medical pipeline is for doctors, though; there’s nothing analogous in law to the reliance on medicare funding of residency slots in medicine.

The medical pipeline doesn't have to be sensitive to federal funding either. There is nothing preventing residencies from being privately funded (besides the fact that most are currently publicly funded).

Medicare funds this out of a broad idea of it being a public good if there are more physicians. Note, there is no obligation that physicians work in public service after residency. This is in contrast to if you go to med school on a military scholarship (in which case, there is an obligation to serve).

In other words, if medicine weren't cartel, the government wouldn't need to pay doctors to train new doctors.

>> A key difference is that the legal pipeline isn’t sensitive to federal funding to govern supply of qualified new lawyers the way the medical pipeline is for doctors, though; there’s nothing analogous in law to the reliance on medicare funding of residency slots in medicine.

This a myth. Residency funding from medicare is an excuse because the funding is so limited and profits are so high. The real bottleneck here is the number of seats opened up by the specialty medical boards. Residents earn very little, under six figures, yet billings for residents are multiples of that. Even after resident stipends, benefits, tooling, and infra, i'm certain medical billings more than cover costs.

Partly -- law controls standards to some extent, but does not control supply necessarily.

Its probably a challenge for any profession where there is a legal monopoly where X service must be performed by Y individual, who also get to choose the quality of X and the number of Y in the market.