Legal News

?A Modest Proposal?: How a Doctor Would Overhaul Legal Practice

By Ashby Jones

Had we to do last week over again, we’d make some changes. We’d have read the expiration date before taking a swig of milk straight from the carton (sour!). We’d have given the barber firmer instructions on what size clipper attachment to use (we’ve got a military thing going on now). And we’d have blogged this piece, by Richard Rafael, called “A Doctor’s Plan for Legal Reform.”

We can’t do anything about the mouthful of lumpy milk or the Top Gun haircut, but we can make amends on the blog.

Here goes:

The piece, penned by Rafael, a New York City radiologist, offers a “modest proposal to rearrange how lawyers do business.” On first blush, the conceit of the piece is a bit much — we can’t venture to think that any of our lawyer readers would deign tell a radiologist how he should better do business. But the piece is really a clever piece of Swiftian satire attacking the health-care reform situation. We’ll let you be the judge if any of the lawyer-specific critiques hold any water.

Rafael starts with a shot at President Obama:

At a town-hall meeting in Portsmouth, N.H., last month, our uninformed lawyer in chief suggested that we physicians would rather chop off a foot than manage diabetes since we would make more money doing surgery. . . .

Physicians have never been so insulted. Because of these affronts, I will gladly volunteer for the important duty of controlling and regulating lawyers. Since most of what lawyers do is repetitive boilerplate or pushing paper, physicians would have no problem dictating what is appropriate for attorneys. We physicians know much more about legal practice than lawyers do about medicine.

He continues with some bullet-points:

• Contingency fees will be discouraged, and eventually outlawed, over a five-year period. This will put legal rewards back into the pockets of the deserving-the public and the aggrieved parties. Slick lawyers taking their “cut” smacks of a bookie operation. Attorneys will be permitted to keep up to 3% in contingency cases, the remainder going into a pool for poor people.
• Legal “DRGs.” Each potential legal situation will be assigned a relative value, and charges limited to this amount . . . . Government schedules of flat fees for each service, analogous to medicine’s Diagnosis Related Groups (DRGs), will be issued. For example, any divorce will have a set fee of, say, $1,000, regardless of its simplicity or complexity. This will eliminate shady hourly billing. Niggling fees such as $2 per page photocopied or faxed would disappear. Who else nickels-and-dimes you while at the same time charging hundreds of dollars per hour? I’m surprised lawyers don’t tack shipping and handling onto their bills.
• Lawyer Reduction Act (H.R. -3200). A self-explanatory bill that not only decreases the number of law students, but also arbitrarily removes 3,200 attorneys from practice each year. Textbook addition by subtraction.

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on September 08, 2009 (boomark / email).