Well, it isn't always that they aren't competent. Put that same lawyer in a position where they are paid, and I'm guessing things would improve.
But what actually happens is that the system makes them incompetent simply being in the job. For example, the caseload is too high, which means that they cannot spend the time a paid lawyer would spend on it. Folks also get little choice in which of these cases they take and which they do not. On top of all of this, they are working in a system stacked against them and they usually aren't getting paid much.
To be fair, the lawyers who are below average often end up in other places rather than representing clients in court.
It used to be people would talk about the hellish conditions doing hourly document review, but that got offshored years ago, so I'm not sure what the situation is now.
It incentivizes lawyers who prefer expensive lawyering.
Competence is an orthogonal question.
Lawyers are basically mercenaries engaged in trial by combat, abstracted to an exchange of relevant facts and opinions.
It's not obvious that a battle between mercenaries is the best way to get a just result.
Considered systemically, lawyers also control legislation.
While it would be better for consumers to have much stronger protections, the people who make money out of weak protections are not incentivized to argue for stronger laws which would reduce their billable hours.
I mean, it presumably takes relatively little money to bring in competent lawyers to do things properly, and yet that Four Seasons Landscaping thing happened. You're not, generally, talking about someone who appears to value (or perhaps even understand) competence.
It is spectacular how incompetent lawyers are providing service to the public that pays them eventually, they are only able to communicate to other lawyers, so why should we use their services at all? We can get into trouble without them the same easy being cluless either way.
If what you are saying is true (and it sure seems to be) then we should also expect a decrease in the quality of available attorneys. That would also be in agreement of my recent real-life experiences.
Now I know it's a tough job blah, blah, but seriously the best experiences I've had with attorneys recently is when they did nothing but held my through the unnecessary complex and unfriendly legal system. I felt I got my money's worth in those instances from their familiarity of jumping through bureaucratic hoops. But I recently spent money on a lawyer that completely screwed everything up. I am certain that I would have been better off cluelessly stumbling into court.
I also wonder how much of this there's a lot to do with a rot system where you have too much lawyers and giving they need to make money as anyone else, the judicial system have loopholes that can gamed, turning into this game that leads nowhere but keep going because its cash cow to so many people (I mean, how is this different from how mobs opperate in the underworld).
Later when the whole thing is rot beyiond control theres no way you can fight the system anymore, even if you are powerful and have the inclination to do it..
I pity real lawyers (the ones that have integrity and do it also because its their passion)
It's an adversarial system, though. For every legal team trying to exploit the flaws in our system, there's another trying to stop them from doing so. They aren't all bad actors.
What I can't understand is why billing rates haven't plummeted due to the glut of law school grads they keep talking about. It's not as if the bar associations have kept that many off the market.
What's wrong with his lawyers' getting paid? Sure, they may get paid a lot, but lawyering is actually quite hard, requires grueling hours in a frequently miserable office culture, and typically requires large amounts of educational debt (the average law school grad has debt in the mid $100,000s). Most of my friends are lawyers (and yes, I am too) and I can tell you that very few of them are living fun lives.
I'm not saying they deserve anyone's sympathy. Objectively speaking, of course, most lawyers are doing pretty well (though there's this: http://www.cnn.com/2014/01/19/us/lawyer-suicides/). But I don't see how there's anything wrong with somebody paying their fees. They are earning them, after all.
IDK, I see a lawyer as a positive benefit. Sure, some city, state, or federal employees are incompetent but at least there is a means of getting help if you're desperate enough.
It’s worse: the legal industry is efficiency-hostile because it relies heavily on reinventing the wheel on an hourly basis with the moat of a guild system to keep competition under control. And worse yet: most clients aren’t interested in anything less than the most expensive, white-glove service because they equate paying more to buying more peace of mind. In reality, most clients pay law firms gobs of money to read stuff that they can’t be bothered to read themselves. And law firms can’t even be held accountable for giving bad advice. It’s a pretty bleak landscape for problem-solvers.
I wonder if there is a 'job creation system' at play here for those lawyers to have a job or exist in the first place. If a country has a good and functional administrative system in place, that would not be needed.
i don't agree with everything you said, but i do find it peculiar that lawyers are paid to make things worse (that is, get in the middle of arguments and escalate them). the more they escalate, the more they get paid. it seems like the worst kind of misaligned incentive.
There are too many situations in our society where money wins because they hire better lawyers. The solution is not to make more money to hire better lawyers, but to change the system so such a step isn't necessary. I don't know if people have noticed, but lawyers win when people fight, and the more they fight, the more complicated the law and the case, the more wealth is transferred to the legal profession. I'd like to see short contracts, arbitration, and reasonable support for pro se representation in court. Judges cannot and should not look down on self-representing litigants, and the law and court rules should not be so complex that an average citizen cannot navigate it.
Of course, lawyers represent the single most powerful political bloc in the nation, so it's a tough road.
Agreed, it's time for those people to try to learn a real job instead of living off others.
Most of those lawyers are not helping the people who needs legal help the most, they are just feeding around bigco. The most useful lawyers are not wealthy, because their clients are poor, uneducated (so the lawyer provides a lot of knowledge difference) and have a very high legal risk (jail or death).
From the outside in, there are a lot of aspects of the legal system that look like this - welfare for lawyers. Unfortunately, fixing it requires changing the law and we've made of practice of sending a lot of lawyers to Capitol Hill who are very sympathetic to the needs of lawyers. It's probably the biggest self-perpetuating interest group there is.
But what actually happens is that the system makes them incompetent simply being in the job. For example, the caseload is too high, which means that they cannot spend the time a paid lawyer would spend on it. Folks also get little choice in which of these cases they take and which they do not. On top of all of this, they are working in a system stacked against them and they usually aren't getting paid much.
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