Litigation

"A nation of lawyers and judges"

By Ted Frank

Larry Ribstein's review of Benjamin Barton's new book, The Lawyer-Judge Bias, summarizes the countless ways the judicial system favors lawyers at the expense of other elements of society. I've previously noted that lawyers would go out of business if legal malpractice standards were anything like medical malpractice standards. And the bar is attempting to increase lawyer hegemony through the promotion of civil Gideon.

Ribstein suggests that changes in the legal information industry could reduce the power of lawyers, but I'm skeptical, given the control of the power of lawyers over what is and isn't permissible. Ribstein already took us up on our invitation to analyze how one state bar is trying to squelch attorneys' use of Groupon to provide cheaper legal services. The outsourcing of discovery will evaporate overnight the first time Wikileaks gets a hold of attorney-client privileged documents and a court helpfully rules that the mysterious privilege was waived when the document was sent overseas to non-American-licensed personnel. Meanwhile, in 2007, Democrat Charles Schumer and Iconoclast Michael Bloomberg called for reform, noting that our legal system was choking New York's competitiveness in the financial industry, and Congress responded with Dodd-Frank and the Obama administration pushed for a rollback of Supreme Court decisions reducing the scope of the abusiveness of the securities laws—even as the New York Stock Exchange finds it needs German help to survive.

Full post as published by Point of Law on February 22, 2011 (boomark / email).