I've wondered about this too. I agree that a newly minted JD really isn't typically ready to be a lawyer (they don't do residencies like physicians). But then I read about how much legal help an untrained (legally) but highly literate person in prison can provide to fellow inmates, and it does seem that a new grad would be better than what a lot of people get. Especially since a court appointed lawyer is only available to those who can't afford it under narrow circumstances. There are plenty of things that can lead to prison in a roundabout way that don't qualify for a count-appointed lawyer - and even if prison isn't in the cards, the stakes can be unbelievably high.

Part of the problem, I think, is just how little money many people who need legal help actually have. My guess is that there's a cliff between $150/hr and the next tier that people can afford. In other words, they can pay for the "expensive" lawyer ($150/hr isn't particularly high for a legal bill), or they can't pay at all.

I do think that completely restructuring the system for joining the bar might accomplish this. In other words, allow law to be an undergraduate major, or perhaps allow people to test in through self-study. Find a way for people to join the field without going very heavily into debt. That might make it possible for practitioners to get their fees down, while still offering a service that is immeasurably better than no lawyer at all.

Still, pretty hard when you're multiplying by zero, which may be the case here.

The market for legal services is an extreme power law. I used to run an online arbitration service where I paid arbitrators a fixed $150 for handling a case and was amazed at the caliber of people that applied.

Former law firm partners, Harvard Law grads who worked on Capitol Hill before, legal scholars with published books, all of it.

Turns out a tiny number of arbitrators can charge hundreds of dollars per hour for high value arbitration cases, while the rest just begs for scraps.

What happened to the service?

Arbitration requires either an arbitration clause upfront or a mutual post-dispute agreement to arbitrate. The latter rarely never happens as cases are often quite clear or parties don't talk anymore, the former is rare for small claims where my $300 arbitration made sense.

So it turned out I was begging for scraps too. The only way similar services survive is by partnering with marketplaces and handling all their disputes. This leads to kangaroo courts cause the arbitration firm ends up having just a few large clients (the marketplaces) despite having hundreds or thousands of cases (the marketplace users).

A huge chunk of recent grads just aren't cut out to be lawyers. They can't write, they can't thoughtfully analyze issues, and they can't effectively advocate for their client.

But the big supply choke-point is the entry level job. Law school and the bar exam don't make you a passable lawyer. You need supervision for a while.

Nobody wants to pay for baby lawyers because they are slow and don't know what they are doing. So the big firms hire a bunch of people and work them to death. They can force their clients to pay for the baby lawyers because they are supervised "by the best." Also, these types of cases involve a lot of paperpushing that a smart baby lawyer can handle. The big firms need juniors to do that bitch work, but also because they'll need midlevel and senior associates to do a lot of real work. If you don't get them out of school, it's hard to get them as a midlevel associate (4-6 years out of school).

Midsize firms don't hire many junior associates. They can't afford to charge for the training. So they take people who leave the big firms.

Corporation's "in-house" legal groups also tend to avoid hiring baby lawyers because they only want seasoned vets. Although, this is changing a bit. Some companies with large legal departments discovered that new lawyers are so cheap, it might be better to just train them in house.

Small firms hire enough people to run their cases, which isn't a lot.

If you don't get hired out of the gate, it's very hard to get a legal job. You are seen as tainted. You never develop experience. And you fall out of the market.

I think roughly 50% of legal grads either never practice or only practice a few years and then quit.

Also, legal work isn't fungible. People specialize pretty quickly. If you start out doing DUI cases, you no longer compete with the guy who started doing patent work for F500 companies. It is as different as webdesign is from programming a self driving car.

The supply of "hirable lawyers," those with real experience, is gated by the amount of legal activity in the broader economy.

It appears relatively few are establishing their own practices because the income from a private practice is very uncertain.

It also looks like demand for lawyer related services has also decreased. The larger firms have responded to this by laying people off - it seems they would prefer to have few, highly compensated positions rather than many lowly paid positions.

I think it has, in some respects. We have things like LegalZoom.com, which provide quick access to a law professional for things like wills and incorporation documents.

People usually want to hire experienced lawyers. So there is a large pool of recent graduates and a small pool of those experienced.