A few thoughts on #a2j and the economic consequences of “expanding” it by making it easier for non-lawyers to participate in the system. Not necessarily brilliant or original. Just thinking.
Columnist @asymmetricinfo writes a lot about how path dependence has led us to a place where we will find it difficult to significantly lower healthcare costs because healthcare workers in the United States, notably doctors and nurses...
...have structured huge chunks of their lives around the idea that their professional services will have a certain market value. I’m not just talking about plastic surgeons on Rodeo Drive making their Lambo and alimony payments, I’m talking about assuming...
...hundreds of thousands in debt and still expecting to have a reasonable (upper) middle-class life while servicing it, putting off the start of your working career by almost a decade, the whole shebang. There’s a lot of assumptions that go into making that very risky decision.
Now imagine we cut the floor out from under lawyers, who don’t even have the security doctors do - namely, people aren’t going to stop getting sick any time soon, but a lot of our livelihoods could vanish overnight with the stroke of a pen.
Nor, quite frankly, does the average lawyer *even now* have the economic prospectives that a new doctor has. The Biggest of Biglaw will always do well, absent complete societal upheaval. But I’m here to tell you, it’s hard out here for the ones below those lofty heights.
Economic adjustments to the legal field to try to increase #a2j are not going to hit Biglaw and the in-house department at Microsoft or Chase. (Except, of course, it will make tech companies and venture capital LOTS of money.) They will hit Joan Q. Public, Esq.
I am extremely reasonably priced for a lawyer of my ability and experience. But I can’t compete with LegalZoom. What they’ll pay me to draft a patent as an “affiliated attorney” literally will not allow me to both put in the time necessary to produce ethically acceptable...
...work product, and make my (entirely reasonable) mortgage, student loan, and my family's living expenses. The numbers don’t work. They don’t. And really, I do not live an extravagant lifestyle. So my choices, if I want to participate in this grand tech-enabled ...
... experiment in #a2j, or at least #a2IP, are to produce substandard work product, or to go and live under a bridge somewhere. So yes, you’re darn tootin' I’m against economic experiments like that. Because you can call me a gatekeeper if you like. I won’t even deny that's...
...part of my motivation, if you think it’d save time. But it doesn’t *matter* if that's my motivation because the numbers. Don’t. Work. They don’t work for me, they don’t work for any lawyer who didn’t full-ride law school and wants to have more than a 2-bedroom condo...
... in a suburb an hour and a half out or a crappy studio in a questionable part of a city. If you want to subsidize #a2j we might get somewhere. Making it way cheaper will be catastrophic.
And maybe you’re a “move fast and break things” kind of person. If so, you can stop reading because you won’t believe anything I’m saying and also, I believe you are an agent of the Adversary and I would prefer you stay away from me.
Could tech improve #a2j? Of COURSE it could. It already is. Avvo, absent their more extravagant attempts to breach the walls of professional conduct, has all by itself probably been extremely helpful just allowing people to FIND lawyers outside of TV ads and billboards.
Could we improve #a2j by letting nonlawyers do legal work? Maybe. Maybe not. In the short run, possibly (although access to what *level* of justice is a separate question.) But in the long run you MIGHT increase #a2j but you WILL destructively disrupt the legal system.
You think people who can only afford “cheap” lawyers are at a disadvantage now in court? Think how much worse it’ll be when all they can afford is a LegalZoom referral making less per hour than a public defender, with just as many cases (to pay loans) and no government backing.
The world is going to do what the world is going to do. But for the love of Chesterton, *think* about what you are doing. Think about the consequences. Think about how “creative destruction” is not the same force when it is applied to slide-rule factories...
...as it is when applied to the underpinnings of our system of government, the basics of our economy, the very things that allow our society to *function.* I beseech you, think it possible you may be mistaken.
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