We've been reading for at least 10 years, maybe longer, about the glut of lawyers in the marketplace. Law firms are shrinking, outsourcing research and investing in labor-saving technology, and at the same time thousands of newly minted lawyers can't find jobs that have anything to do with their education. A local TV station showed a little feature this week about a young member of the bar who lives with his parents and works picking up towels at a health club.
Yet legal services continue to be wildly expensive. A lawyer in a criminal or civil matter typically bills his own time at a rate of hundreds of dollars an hour, and charges by the minute for anything and everything his support staff does. Many people who might benefit from legal advice in the most routine issues -- landlord/tenant disputes, traffic tickets, auto leases, consumer purchases -- can't afford to walk through a lawyer's front door. At least one of the many roots of the mortgage crisis was that many home buyers signed a lot of papers that they didn't understand and had no one to explain.
Question: Why doesn't supply and demand work here? Why aren't young grads forming walk-in storefront offices, where anybody with a concern could at least have an lawyer explain the issues in a low-cost consultation, like the "Minute Clinics" that nurse practitioners are opening in drug stores? If I recall correctly, somebody tried that 20 or 25 years ago with Hyatt Legal Clinics, but that didn't last long, in part because the lawyers weren't getting rich. But the economic environment has changed. Just as you can take your tax problem to an H&R Block on every corner, or get your eyes checked by optometrists at Walmart and Target, or get shots from supermarket pharmacists, why shouldn't you be able to talk to a lawyer without mortgaging your house (which might be the very issue that you need a lawyer for)?
Yet legal services continue to be wildly expensive. A lawyer in a criminal or civil matter typically bills his own time at a rate of hundreds of dollars an hour, and charges by the minute for anything and everything his support staff does. Many people who might benefit from legal advice in the most routine issues -- landlord/tenant disputes, traffic tickets, auto leases, consumer purchases -- can't afford to walk through a lawyer's front door. At least one of the many roots of the mortgage crisis was that many home buyers signed a lot of papers that they didn't understand and had no one to explain.
Question: Why doesn't supply and demand work here? Why aren't young grads forming walk-in storefront offices, where anybody with a concern could at least have an lawyer explain the issues in a low-cost consultation, like the "Minute Clinics" that nurse practitioners are opening in drug stores? If I recall correctly, somebody tried that 20 or 25 years ago with Hyatt Legal Clinics, but that didn't last long, in part because the lawyers weren't getting rich. But the economic environment has changed. Just as you can take your tax problem to an H&R Block on every corner, or get your eyes checked by optometrists at Walmart and Target, or get shots from supermarket pharmacists, why shouldn't you be able to talk to a lawyer without mortgaging your house (which might be the very issue that you need a lawyer for)?
via JREF Forum http://forums.randi.org/showthread.php?t=265115&goto=newpost
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