Our whole system is falling apart. All the protections for regular people are pretty much gone while the elite enjoy freedom from prosecution for major crimes.
Sounds like an opportunity. Live chats with lawyers for significantly lower prices than in-person consultation might cost. You can represent yourself, but get guidance from a real lawyer. Sounds like something that already exists since it seems obvious in retrospect, but not sure.
The problem is that non lawyers are not allowed to own law firms. And what lawyer wants to work over low cost chat sitting in a room all day? That's part of why this sort of service doesn't and will not exist.
State bars don't want outside investors or non-lawyer executives directing the conduct of lawyers. (Also, why would you want to allow non-lawyer ownership of law firms? The reason you have corporate structures is to be able to raise capital. Law firms require very little capital.)
Law as currently practiced, does not require much capital. You're correct about that.
But legal services in general are an expensive, labor-intensive craft industry. Just like any craft industry, there's probably scope for low-touch industrialization alongside high-end bespoke craftmanship. Clothing is a good example of what I'm talking about--rich people have tailors, everyone else buys off the rack. What you have now in law and may other professions only works for the high-touch case.
Atrium (google them) is trying to get around this by having a traditional high-touch law firm use a lot of software provided by a standard silicon valley-financed venture capital startup. They're basically laundering legal fees to the startup side via the law firm. I'm not sure of the exact legalities but we need more stuff like this.
Access matters. A system that, for completely well-intentioned reasons, attempts to guarantee that everyone only gets the best, means the low end will never have access at affordable rates. It's simple economics. Until practitioners work for free (they won't), or there's some way to do things more cheaply, the bottom won't get served.
The atrium model isn’t problematic at all. Law firms use software built by third parties all the time. (West Law, document review platforms, etc.) You don’t need to permit non lawyer ownership of law firms to have that.
Capital is only one of the things a founder brings in - a point of view and skills are others. The legal profession could be missing out on avenues of innovation by requiring a founder to be a lawyer.
“Also, why would you want to allow non-lawyer ownership of law firms?”
For the same reason or not-reason you can have any other company owned by people who are not experts in the company’s subject. This is probably good for lawyers but otherwise this restriction makes no sense.
Hey remember how intel suffered for years under CEOs who were chip engineers? And then started doing really great when they moved away from that model and started hiring MBA CEOs?
If law firms run by lawyers run better, then why do they need a rule to enforce this? Shouldn't the market take care of this? ie Law Firms with Lawyer owners will simply out compete clueless Law Firms with owners who are not lawyers.
"Better" is a value judgement, and the specific value you've chosen is "makes more money". One concern, I think, is that a non-lawyer may push employees towards legally-unethical behavior. Since the non-lawyer can fire the lawyers, that gives them a big stick they can use to influence the employees.
Lawyers are subject to ethical requirements that are not imposed on non-lawyers. And those ethical requirements are just that - requirements. If a lawyer breaks them, they jeopardize their entire careers. There's no equivalent for a professional CEO. Clients insist that their attorneys act in a fiduciary capacity.
This is very different from the chip engineer scenario. It is the most important reason why non-lawyers are not allowed to own law firms. Because non-lawyers are not bound by rules that require them to put profit motives second in many circumstances.
Because you're not optimizing for the success of the law firms or their clients, but for the structure and integrity of the court system. That integrity depends heavily on the fact that lawyers are trusted repeat players who have a lot of exposure and are personally on the hook for any problem. (Moreover, because a law license is not a right, the due process requirements and burden of proof for disciplining lawyers is far lower than for imposing criminal penalties on non-lawyer individuals. You don't need a trial, you don't get a jury, there is no "beyond a reasonable doubt." Supervising lawyers can be held liable for the misconduct of their subordinates with little showing of knowledge or intent regarding the misconduct.)
This is roughly the fix in place in other systems that inherit from the English system.
The McKenzie Friend rules says if you proceed pro se you can nevertheless have somebody who may or may not be trained as a lawyer present to help you by taking notes, prompting, and giving advice not so different from the way a lawyer might use assistants.
You have to do all the actual talking, most weight is on your shoulders - you can't use this to basically keep all the advantages of pro se (courts give people proceeding on this basis more leeway because they may not know and understand the rules a lawyer must master) while having a lawyer do everything, but you can at least have somebody to help you and it can be someone legally trained.
In the UK this principle is named for a Mr McKenzie who lost a divorce case because the lawyer sent to try to assist him after he lost funding for a "real" lawyer wasn't qualified to appear in front of that court (an Australian lawyer, in an English court), and the court reasoned that lawyer was thus prohibited from attending except to sit in the public gallery. On appeal a higher court concluded that nothing clearly prohibited this lawyer being present as "a friend" of McKenzie and so that's the McKenzie Friend rule.
Since they aren't a "real" lawyer it can be a paralegal working for cheap, somebody who has done a year's law school and dropped out, or even just your actual friend who is better at reading and thinking than you are. It all helps.
It sort of makes sense. A lawyer is authorized to represent someone in court, and what they do is binding. But anyone can give you advice in the court house parking lot.
Pro se plaintiffs should pass some sort of light bar exam (some sort of licensing). And they should be made to pay higher fees to access the court systems. If they lose more than 3 times in a row they should be banned from the court systems entirely.
This is only to weed out the aholes who run frivolous suits hoping for an easy pay day when defendants settle to avoid protracted and useless litigation.
Also we should get rid of the "American rule" which prevents defendants who prevail to seek damages from frivolous plaintiffs.
[Sort of off topic]
From what I've seen in my limited experience with the US court system is split a couple ways:
Having no money in a court room results in you:
- getting a public defender that is incredibly overworked and underpaid; which results in your case having the dice rolled on if they are able to spend the time to successfully represent you.
Having no experience in a court room results in you:
- pleading which could have possibly worse results than if you tried the case and played it out naturally. It's not always appropriate for the case, but sometimes a lot of people plead to simply return to work. There is also a lot of cops that linger around doing just this, making you plead by handing you forms saying you need to sign this. Any inexperience in traffic courts for example makes you think you need to sign this, resulting in the scenario above, possible points for a no violation type offense.
Having money but no experience in a court room results in you:
- retaining a lawyer on your own dime; the money adds up, and if they don't find a way to represent you in your situation quickly, you're going to pay for every adjournment the lawyer may need. If you're searching lawyers, be sure to ask if they have big workloads, because the ones that have a smaller, more manageable number of ongoing cases are going to be your best bet obviously.
The thing about too many ongoing cases is the current courts situation dealing with overworked public defenders and lawyers. Not having the time it takes to focus on each case or creating mistakes due to burnout & fatigue. After having even one negative experience with a public defender or lawyer like this, I could easily see people wanting to represent themselves or like in the articles case, they aren't even guaranteed to get one in a civil suit.
My last two employers have both offered Hyatt Legal group plans[1] as a voluntary benefit.
I signed up because it seemed like a potentially useful benefit and ~$9/paycheck was a tiny enough cost to impulse check that box without much thought.
It's turned out to be one of my favorite, most used company benefits. Both companies have carved out different services the plan covers, but in general it has covered every instance I've ever needed to leverage a lawyer for personal needs. And removes the impetus of having to find/vet/pay a lawyer for smaller work like reviewing and drafting legal documents that I otherwise would have done myself and hoped I covered everything well enough.
It gives you the benefit of the second scenario, without the unpredictable costs of retaining a lawyer directly. If your work offers it, I highly recommend getting it.
I'm not a lawyer, and there are a lot of little facets to these rules so I could be wrong.
This looks basically like a "legal costs insurance", so the company pays into a fund that then pays the lawyers. I assume the company has no control over the money once it is in the insurance fund. So long as the lawyer doesn't represent the company directly in other dealings then yes they should be able to represent you in an employment dispute.
If the company was just providing direct access to their in-house counsel then no, that'd be a conflict of interest.
Most legal plans offered, even through third parties, explicitly do not cover employee-employer disputes. This has been the case at both Microsoft and Amazon that I have seen.
That's just rude. I think so long as the funding is out of the company's control there's no ethical violations but again there's a lot of rules and I could be wrong.
In my experience, employment law is the one area the service cannot address as they have the conflict of interest with the employer that supplements the cost of the program.
There are, but they're accounted for and explicitly called out and noted as situations that aren't covered. I don't know if it generalizes to all of their plans (employers can customize them to an extent), but for the two companies I've had it through:
- The employer can't see individual usage. It's effectively structured as an insurance plan, and all they can see is aggregate utilization levels for the group plan as a whole.
- Engagements are covered by all of the same client-lawyer confidentiality you'd have if you retained the lawyer personally. There's no shenanigans that rope your employer into that circle of privilege.
- Any suit/legal issue involving your company (the plan sponsor) is automatically not a covered situation you can use them for. That way they avoid the conflict of interest.
- Business-related issues aren't covered. So, for example, your plan may include all of the legal aspects of (document/title review, presence during closing, etc) during buying a house. But only if the house is for personal use. Houses bought as an investment property rather than a residence to live in would be excluded. Same with stuff like freelancing contracts and whatnot.
Your work negotiates which services are covered under their group plan.
My last company had a blanket "Not Covered" for all of the family law services. My current company's plan is a lot more liberal and expansive in covered services, and covers all of the family law services offered to some extent[1]. The only things in the family law section limited to just advisory coverage vs. representation are related to the messy world of divorce (divorce, custody, support orders, etc).
You sometimes get a private attorney who is assigned to a small public defense case load. I don't know how voluntary that is on the part of the lawyers. It can be forced upon them as a duty of court officers. In theory it should distribute the work more equitably.
Hypothesis: the Bar Association is a cartel; limits supply, keeps prices high. The supply of lawyers is artificially constrained, while the volume of civil litigation only grows larger every year. One used to be able to self-study, pass an exam, and practice law. Now it virtually always requires 3 years of law school, at a cost of thousands.
Similar idea w/ doctors (although obviously different specifics) or with any licensed profession really. Yes, you need some form of licensing to keep all the fakes out. On the other hand, should it really require so much time and so much money? On some level it's just raising costs for everyone and limiting supply.
There is no "Bar Association." There are 50 different state bars with different rules. The largest legal jurisdiction, New York, requires only one year of law school. California, the third largest, does not require a law degree at all. Interestingly enough, California and New York are the two states with the highest rates for legal services. (Though obviously it's not a cause-and-effect relationship.)
There is an American Bar Association, but it does not regulate licensing. It regulates accreditation of law schools, but it was sued by the DOJ in the 1970s for antitrust violations. Unlike the AMA, it has aggressively accredited new law schools. Since 1970, the cumulative number of JDs granted over the previous 35-year period increased by 3.5x, while the number of employed attorneys increased by 2x: https://www.mybudget360.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/35-ye....
The same thing has happened in the areas of engineering where licensure is required. An accredited degree is now an explicit requirement in most states to take the PE exam, and the FE exam is mandatory to start the clock on your experience period.
Limited? There's a law office on every corner. 2/3 of all billboards are rented by law offices (ok, that's made up, but still...)
However, FTA:
> Last year, the Trump administration effectively closed the Justice Department’s Office for Access to Justice, designed in 2010 to make lawyers available to everyone.
Your hypothesis is wrong. At one point I was thinking of changing careers and gave a serious consideration to getting a law degree. I've had long conversations with several attorneys and did plenty of research. You would be surprised at how little most new attorneys make. Unless you land at a firm, you'll end up scrambling to find your own clients as a solo practitioner. Some give up and end up working in the business world on the edges of the legal profession.
> One used to be able to self-study, pass an exam, and practice law. Now it virtually always requires 3 years of law school, at a cost of thousands.
This is state by state. In most U.S. states, you have to go to an accredited brick-and-mortar school, graduate, and pass the bar exam. At that time, there was only two online law schools, both in California. I believe that in CA (maybe one other state) also will let you apprentice for a licensed attorney and pass the bar to become a licensed attorney.
I know somebody tangentially who self studied and passed the CA bar. He was a squatter at the time and successfully represented himself in a adverse possession suit and now owns said squat in Oakland.
I wish I had more details but he was friend of my ex.
> One used to be able to self-study, pass an exam, and practice law.
AFAIU your beef is with state legislators and not the Bar. They're the ones setting the regulations for practicing law. I agree with you, though: self-study or apprenticeship + exam sounds like a valid way to become an attorney.
> Hypothesis: the Bar Association is a cartel; limits supply, keeps prices high. The supply of lawyers is artificially constrained
The bar associations are actually trade unions. Restricting the supply of labor is the only mechanism unions have available to increase the wages of union members, and all unions do it, only the various lawyers, doctors and pilots unions are simply the most effective in this regard.
The license to be a Barber or a Hair Dresser is a cartel, but you would never say the same thing about requiring doctors and civil engineers being licensed.
Being represented by an under-qualified attorney can ruin your life. You can go to jail because your attorney was incompetent. When the consequences are that high, we need the Bar.
There's no reason a Barber couldn't charge based on time spent cutting your hair.
There's also no reason a lawyer cannot charge a fixed fee, which is more standard for document drafting.
You might not want to pay a lawyer a fixed fee for a case though, as that would incentivize them to put in as little work as possible.
And none of this has anything to do with the licensing, which artificially restricts the supply of Barbers and Lawyers, letting them charge more regardless of the billing scheme.
> Being represented by an under-qualified attorney can ruin your life. You can go to jail because your attorney was incompetent. When the consequences are that high, we need the Bar.
The same concern cuts both ways though. It's just as problematic to have rules that raise the cost of legal services beyond what some people can afford, because not being able to afford an attorney can lead to all the same dire consequences.
Because we have laws requiring a lawyer be provided in a criminal case and we have high standards for lawyers, you theoretically will get a good lawyer even if you cannot afford one. Of course the public legal system is incredibly under-funded so in reality this doesn't work out.
Let's consider this from a different lens though. "Bridge Engineers are too expensive so lets make the requirements to become one more lax" is obviously a dangerous idea. There is a minimum amount of knowledge and experience a person needs to be qualified to build a bridge. If you cannot afford to pay someone who meets the requirements, you have no business building a bridge.
> Because we have laws requiring a lawyer be provided in a criminal case and we have high standards for lawyers, you theoretically will get a good lawyer even if you cannot afford one. Of course the public legal system is incredibly under-funded so in reality this doesn't work out.
"In theory there is no difference between theory and practice but in practice there is."
> "Bridge Engineers are too expensive so lets make the requirements to become one more lax" is obviously a dangerous idea.
A lot less dangerous than the alternative of not hiring a Bridge Engineer at all and still having to build the bridge, which is the analogous situation for legal services.
> The issue is funding, not the requirements.
Not necessarily. Standards can be inefficiently high. It's not worth spending A to avoid a 1% chance of losing B when 100A is more than B.
> A lot less dangerous than the alternative of not hiring a Bridge Engineer at all and still having to build the bridge, which is the analogous situation for legal services.
That is the absurdity here though, that people are being forced to build a bridge with no support. With more funding, we could provide an engineer for every bridge (and a lawyer for every case). Nobody should be forced to go through the legal system without an lawyer. Period.
But those lawyers aren't working as public defenders because it's probably the worst job to take once you've invested in a law degree in terms of pay and stress. And until the funding situation changes to make that job more desirable, people will continue to suffer no matter how many lawyers there are.
> That is the absurdity here though, that people are being forced to build a bridge with no support. With more funding, we could provide an engineer for every bridge (and a lawyer for every case). Nobody should be forced to go through the legal system without an lawyer. Period.
That's fair, but then you're also talking about a foundational change to the legal system. Just providing a real public defender to criminal defendants would dramatically reduce the number who take a plea, and then you're not just funding public defenders, you now need more prosecutors and police officers and judges because there are so many more cases where the defendant would have their day in court. That would explode the budget so much that the proposal would be politically impossible without some significant changes to the laws (e.g. end the war on drugs and do something more meaningful than we ever have before about poverty) to dramatically reduce the number of criminal defendants to begin with. Which is what we need -- but that's hardly just a matter of funding. It requires a huge political change.
And it gets even worse for civil cases, because then you're going to want to fund the plaintiffs as well, otherwise you're back to the little guy being unrepresented. But then you're creating an incentive for plaintiffs to file thousands of frivolous lawsuits at taxpayer expense to try to find one that sticks, because who benefits is no longer aligned with who pays. Spending money reduces barriers which multiplies the amount of money you would have to spend.
The only way to reduce the cost is to actually reduce the cost, i.e. reduce the number of man-hours it takes for a given legal process, not just change who is paying for it.
> The number of lawyers has been growing in recent years. It's hard to claim standards are too high when more people are becoming lawyers than ever before.
The claim isn't that the standards are preventing people from becoming attorneys, it's that they're raising costs on clients. If you over-regulate nuclear power, the problem isn't that then nobody wants to be a construction worker and build nuclear plants, it's that it makes nuclear cost more than fossil fuels like coal. And that, even when it does get used, it still costs more than it should because you're imposing rules whose cost exceeds their value.
Hah. Limited supply of lawyers?? That’s not true at all. The problem is the bloated cost of law school, which coincidentally is the same cost as the max allowable federal loans.
> Hypothesis: the Bar Association is a cartel; limits supply, keeps prices high.
The mechanism is a little different than that. They don't limit the supply, they drive demand by causing attorneys to be risk-averse.
For example, there are questions an attorney might be able to answer off the top of their head and be correct about 99.9% of the time. A low income client may like those odds and be much happier to take them in exchange for getting charged for 15 minutes of time than to have the attorney take two hours to double check the answer. The attorney, however, would answer a thousand questions like that a year and then have even odds of getting one of them wrong and getting disbarred over it. That takes option one off the table. Multiplied by every question the client has, that means the client has to pay for eight times as much lawyer time. Even if it isn't worth paying your lawyer $5000 more to e.g. avoid a 1% probability of a $15,000 penalty.
I can relate. Last year's tax return put income at around $600K. So I'm not poor. I have found it very difficult to find a lawyer who is actually interested in getting to a solution rather than dragging it out forever.
Here is the cost of filing an agreement negotiated between me and a counter party: $5K.
$5K for you to call someone and send over some paperwork. Sure, i can do the work myself but I could do it wrong, and judges don't like that. In fact, a judge initially rejected it until we had a lawyer.
Can I even get someone on retainer? No. Because the retainer is used up in the first phone call. Useless waste of money.
In my mind, lawyers have gone from people who used to be the bedrock against tyranny and are now rent seekers.
Unbundled services are a step forward, but then you lose the benefit of context.
The way I read it, the legal system charges too much. It isn't the lawyer's problem that the legal system (according to parent's anecdote) requires $5K worth of legal services. DIY isn't even an option.
Besides, who cares how much parent makes? If people making those kind of fat stacks complain, how the hell is a barista supposed to get a lawyer?
I tried to get worker's compensation in Washington state but couldn't find a lawyer anywhere in my area willing to take my case. One actually agreed to meet in person but told me his payoff is based only on the payoff I get. I am not legally allowed to pay him outside of what he would win for me. My payoff would have been lots of physical therapy, doctor visits, and the like. What's 20% of physical therapy? I never heard from him again and ended up just giving up on the case. This was despite or because of I had already had a case in NJ which I couldn't continue due to lack of any doctors willing to take it. It's a great system for the state when you have zero chance of winning. I wonder what Washington state does with all the money it collects and refuses to pay to the people that need it. Other than paying doctors to review cases for ten minutes, violate their Hippocratic oath, and say they don't think the injury is work related when it obviously is.
As someone who represented themselves in a similar sort of case, and successfully repulsed the effort to collect, I have sympathy - the civil courts system gives a slight bias to people who have lawyers - like in my case a default judgment was granted before I could even get my filing in (before the deadline), and then was withdrawn when I submitted my filing.
Writing a brief is hard if you've never done it before, and there is no easy guide to figure out what you need to do to make the system work for you. I represented myself at first because I couldnt afford a lawyer - then the case just sat in an existing but no filings state - then later because the plaintiff scheduled a court date without notifying me, and I only had a one day notice to drag myself into court.
The way legal cases are funded needs to change. You shouldn't have to put up money up front to try a case, but of course then we would need to figure out a way to discourage frivolous lawsuits.
But I'm sure it could be done with some sort of escrow system or something.
Imagine a system where both parties put in however much they are willing to spend, and then 5% of the pool is given to each side for their upfront fee, and then the rest of the pool goes to the winner of the case, or maybe the judge gets to divvy the fees or something.
Then if a big corp and a frugal individual go up against each other, the big corp can put $100,000 in and the other person can put in $5, and neither party gets an advantage because both lawyer teams get $5,000 up front. Or something like that.
There is significantly more price variation in legal services than many (particularly in this cohort) seem to recognize. I admit my own bias here, but I don't quite understand why many in the startup world feel the need to go to 1000+ lawyer international law firms for early-phase legal services. Do any of you hire Ernst and Young or Deloitte to do your startup accounting?
A lot of folks pay a lot of money for legal services because they seem to think they need to hire the same lawyers as Facebook and Google. You hire those same service providers, don't be surprised how much you pay.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 72.2 ms ] threadBut legal services in general are an expensive, labor-intensive craft industry. Just like any craft industry, there's probably scope for low-touch industrialization alongside high-end bespoke craftmanship. Clothing is a good example of what I'm talking about--rich people have tailors, everyone else buys off the rack. What you have now in law and may other professions only works for the high-touch case.
Atrium (google them) is trying to get around this by having a traditional high-touch law firm use a lot of software provided by a standard silicon valley-financed venture capital startup. They're basically laundering legal fees to the startup side via the law firm. I'm not sure of the exact legalities but we need more stuff like this.
Access matters. A system that, for completely well-intentioned reasons, attempts to guarantee that everyone only gets the best, means the low end will never have access at affordable rates. It's simple economics. Until practitioners work for free (they won't), or there's some way to do things more cheaply, the bottom won't get served.
For the same reason or not-reason you can have any other company owned by people who are not experts in the company’s subject. This is probably good for lawyers but otherwise this restriction makes no sense.
This is very different from the chip engineer scenario. It is the most important reason why non-lawyers are not allowed to own law firms. Because non-lawyers are not bound by rules that require them to put profit motives second in many circumstances.
The McKenzie Friend rules says if you proceed pro se you can nevertheless have somebody who may or may not be trained as a lawyer present to help you by taking notes, prompting, and giving advice not so different from the way a lawyer might use assistants.
You have to do all the actual talking, most weight is on your shoulders - you can't use this to basically keep all the advantages of pro se (courts give people proceeding on this basis more leeway because they may not know and understand the rules a lawyer must master) while having a lawyer do everything, but you can at least have somebody to help you and it can be someone legally trained.
In the UK this principle is named for a Mr McKenzie who lost a divorce case because the lawyer sent to try to assist him after he lost funding for a "real" lawyer wasn't qualified to appear in front of that court (an Australian lawyer, in an English court), and the court reasoned that lawyer was thus prohibited from attending except to sit in the public gallery. On appeal a higher court concluded that nothing clearly prohibited this lawyer being present as "a friend" of McKenzie and so that's the McKenzie Friend rule.
Since they aren't a "real" lawyer it can be a paralegal working for cheap, somebody who has done a year's law school and dropped out, or even just your actual friend who is better at reading and thinking than you are. It all helps.
This is only to weed out the aholes who run frivolous suits hoping for an easy pay day when defendants settle to avoid protracted and useless litigation.
Also we should get rid of the "American rule" which prevents defendants who prevail to seek damages from frivolous plaintiffs.
Also, this article talks mostly about people representing themselves while defendants.
Having no money in a court room results in you:
- getting a public defender that is incredibly overworked and underpaid; which results in your case having the dice rolled on if they are able to spend the time to successfully represent you.
Having no experience in a court room results in you:
- pleading which could have possibly worse results than if you tried the case and played it out naturally. It's not always appropriate for the case, but sometimes a lot of people plead to simply return to work. There is also a lot of cops that linger around doing just this, making you plead by handing you forms saying you need to sign this. Any inexperience in traffic courts for example makes you think you need to sign this, resulting in the scenario above, possible points for a no violation type offense.
Having money but no experience in a court room results in you:
- retaining a lawyer on your own dime; the money adds up, and if they don't find a way to represent you in your situation quickly, you're going to pay for every adjournment the lawyer may need. If you're searching lawyers, be sure to ask if they have big workloads, because the ones that have a smaller, more manageable number of ongoing cases are going to be your best bet obviously.
The thing about too many ongoing cases is the current courts situation dealing with overworked public defenders and lawyers. Not having the time it takes to focus on each case or creating mistakes due to burnout & fatigue. After having even one negative experience with a public defender or lawyer like this, I could easily see people wanting to represent themselves or like in the articles case, they aren't even guaranteed to get one in a civil suit.
I signed up because it seemed like a potentially useful benefit and ~$9/paycheck was a tiny enough cost to impulse check that box without much thought.
It's turned out to be one of my favorite, most used company benefits. Both companies have carved out different services the plan covers, but in general it has covered every instance I've ever needed to leverage a lawyer for personal needs. And removes the impetus of having to find/vet/pay a lawyer for smaller work like reviewing and drafting legal documents that I otherwise would have done myself and hoped I covered everything well enough.
It gives you the benefit of the second scenario, without the unpredictable costs of retaining a lawyer directly. If your work offers it, I highly recommend getting it.
[1] https://www.legalplans.com/
This looks basically like a "legal costs insurance", so the company pays into a fund that then pays the lawyers. I assume the company has no control over the money once it is in the insurance fund. So long as the lawyer doesn't represent the company directly in other dealings then yes they should be able to represent you in an employment dispute.
If the company was just providing direct access to their in-house counsel then no, that'd be a conflict of interest.
- The employer can't see individual usage. It's effectively structured as an insurance plan, and all they can see is aggregate utilization levels for the group plan as a whole.
- Engagements are covered by all of the same client-lawyer confidentiality you'd have if you retained the lawyer personally. There's no shenanigans that rope your employer into that circle of privilege.
- Any suit/legal issue involving your company (the plan sponsor) is automatically not a covered situation you can use them for. That way they avoid the conflict of interest.
- Business-related issues aren't covered. So, for example, your plan may include all of the legal aspects of (document/title review, presence during closing, etc) during buying a house. But only if the house is for personal use. Houses bought as an investment property rather than a residence to live in would be excluded. Same with stuff like freelancing contracts and whatnot.
My last company had a blanket "Not Covered" for all of the family law services. My current company's plan is a lot more liberal and expansive in covered services, and covers all of the family law services offered to some extent[1]. The only things in the family law section limited to just advisory coverage vs. representation are related to the messy world of divorce (divorce, custody, support orders, etc).
https://imgur.com/6elP3jL
There is an American Bar Association, but it does not regulate licensing. It regulates accreditation of law schools, but it was sued by the DOJ in the 1970s for antitrust violations. Unlike the AMA, it has aggressively accredited new law schools. Since 1970, the cumulative number of JDs granted over the previous 35-year period increased by 3.5x, while the number of employed attorneys increased by 2x: https://www.mybudget360.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/35-ye....
However, FTA:
> Last year, the Trump administration effectively closed the Justice Department’s Office for Access to Justice, designed in 2010 to make lawyers available to everyone.
Let's put the blame where it should go.
> One used to be able to self-study, pass an exam, and practice law. Now it virtually always requires 3 years of law school, at a cost of thousands.
This is state by state. In most U.S. states, you have to go to an accredited brick-and-mortar school, graduate, and pass the bar exam. At that time, there was only two online law schools, both in California. I believe that in CA (maybe one other state) also will let you apprentice for a licensed attorney and pass the bar to become a licensed attorney.
AFAIU your beef is with state legislators and not the Bar. They're the ones setting the regulations for practicing law. I agree with you, though: self-study or apprenticeship + exam sounds like a valid way to become an attorney.
The bar associations are actually trade unions. Restricting the supply of labor is the only mechanism unions have available to increase the wages of union members, and all unions do it, only the various lawyers, doctors and pilots unions are simply the most effective in this regard.
Being represented by an under-qualified attorney can ruin your life. You can go to jail because your attorney was incompetent. When the consequences are that high, we need the Bar.
There's also no reason a lawyer cannot charge a fixed fee, which is more standard for document drafting.
You might not want to pay a lawyer a fixed fee for a case though, as that would incentivize them to put in as little work as possible.
And none of this has anything to do with the licensing, which artificially restricts the supply of Barbers and Lawyers, letting them charge more regardless of the billing scheme.
The same concern cuts both ways though. It's just as problematic to have rules that raise the cost of legal services beyond what some people can afford, because not being able to afford an attorney can lead to all the same dire consequences.
Let's consider this from a different lens though. "Bridge Engineers are too expensive so lets make the requirements to become one more lax" is obviously a dangerous idea. There is a minimum amount of knowledge and experience a person needs to be qualified to build a bridge. If you cannot afford to pay someone who meets the requirements, you have no business building a bridge.
The issue is funding, not the requirements.
"In theory there is no difference between theory and practice but in practice there is."
> "Bridge Engineers are too expensive so lets make the requirements to become one more lax" is obviously a dangerous idea.
A lot less dangerous than the alternative of not hiring a Bridge Engineer at all and still having to build the bridge, which is the analogous situation for legal services.
> The issue is funding, not the requirements.
Not necessarily. Standards can be inefficiently high. It's not worth spending A to avoid a 1% chance of losing B when 100A is more than B.
That is the absurdity here though, that people are being forced to build a bridge with no support. With more funding, we could provide an engineer for every bridge (and a lawyer for every case). Nobody should be forced to go through the legal system without an lawyer. Period.
The number of lawyers has been growing in recent years. It's hard to claim standards are too high when more people are becoming lawyers than ever before. See: http://www.abajournal.com/news/article/lawyer_population_15_...
But those lawyers aren't working as public defenders because it's probably the worst job to take once you've invested in a law degree in terms of pay and stress. And until the funding situation changes to make that job more desirable, people will continue to suffer no matter how many lawyers there are.
That's fair, but then you're also talking about a foundational change to the legal system. Just providing a real public defender to criminal defendants would dramatically reduce the number who take a plea, and then you're not just funding public defenders, you now need more prosecutors and police officers and judges because there are so many more cases where the defendant would have their day in court. That would explode the budget so much that the proposal would be politically impossible without some significant changes to the laws (e.g. end the war on drugs and do something more meaningful than we ever have before about poverty) to dramatically reduce the number of criminal defendants to begin with. Which is what we need -- but that's hardly just a matter of funding. It requires a huge political change.
And it gets even worse for civil cases, because then you're going to want to fund the plaintiffs as well, otherwise you're back to the little guy being unrepresented. But then you're creating an incentive for plaintiffs to file thousands of frivolous lawsuits at taxpayer expense to try to find one that sticks, because who benefits is no longer aligned with who pays. Spending money reduces barriers which multiplies the amount of money you would have to spend.
The only way to reduce the cost is to actually reduce the cost, i.e. reduce the number of man-hours it takes for a given legal process, not just change who is paying for it.
> The number of lawyers has been growing in recent years. It's hard to claim standards are too high when more people are becoming lawyers than ever before.
The claim isn't that the standards are preventing people from becoming attorneys, it's that they're raising costs on clients. If you over-regulate nuclear power, the problem isn't that then nobody wants to be a construction worker and build nuclear plants, it's that it makes nuclear cost more than fossil fuels like coal. And that, even when it does get used, it still costs more than it should because you're imposing rules whose cost exceeds their value.
The mechanism is a little different than that. They don't limit the supply, they drive demand by causing attorneys to be risk-averse.
For example, there are questions an attorney might be able to answer off the top of their head and be correct about 99.9% of the time. A low income client may like those odds and be much happier to take them in exchange for getting charged for 15 minutes of time than to have the attorney take two hours to double check the answer. The attorney, however, would answer a thousand questions like that a year and then have even odds of getting one of them wrong and getting disbarred over it. That takes option one off the table. Multiplied by every question the client has, that means the client has to pay for eight times as much lawyer time. Even if it isn't worth paying your lawyer $5000 more to e.g. avoid a 1% probability of a $15,000 penalty.
Here is the cost of filing an agreement negotiated between me and a counter party: $5K.
$5K for you to call someone and send over some paperwork. Sure, i can do the work myself but I could do it wrong, and judges don't like that. In fact, a judge initially rejected it until we had a lawyer.
Can I even get someone on retainer? No. Because the retainer is used up in the first phone call. Useless waste of money.
In my mind, lawyers have gone from people who used to be the bedrock against tyranny and are now rent seekers.
Unbundled services are a step forward, but then you lose the benefit of context.
Besides, who cares how much parent makes? If people making those kind of fat stacks complain, how the hell is a barista supposed to get a lawyer?
Lawyers force clients to spend money on the periphery, exhausting their appetite to actually seek redress or whatever they are trying to accomplish.
Writing a brief is hard if you've never done it before, and there is no easy guide to figure out what you need to do to make the system work for you. I represented myself at first because I couldnt afford a lawyer - then the case just sat in an existing but no filings state - then later because the plaintiff scheduled a court date without notifying me, and I only had a one day notice to drag myself into court.
But I'm sure it could be done with some sort of escrow system or something.
Imagine a system where both parties put in however much they are willing to spend, and then 5% of the pool is given to each side for their upfront fee, and then the rest of the pool goes to the winner of the case, or maybe the judge gets to divvy the fees or something.
Then if a big corp and a frugal individual go up against each other, the big corp can put $100,000 in and the other person can put in $5, and neither party gets an advantage because both lawyer teams get $5,000 up front. Or something like that.
A lot of folks pay a lot of money for legal services because they seem to think they need to hire the same lawyers as Facebook and Google. You hire those same service providers, don't be surprised how much you pay.