When Your Attorney Wins, Everyone Else Loses
“A society based on the letter of the law and never reaching any higher fails to take advantage of the full range of human possibilities. The letter of the law is too cold and formal to have a beneficial influence on society. Whenever the tissue of life is woven of legalistic relationships, it creates an atmosphere of spiritual mediocrity that paralyzes men's noblest impulses.” – Alexander Solzhenitsyn
My entrepreneurship has few absolute rules, but this is one of them: If I wind up in court, as either plaintiff or defendant, I have failed.
Here's an excerpt from a Des Moines Register column by Donald Kaul.
"Possibly you've heard the story about the fellow who opened a law office in a town that had no lawyers and found he wasn't making a living? Until a second lawyer started a practice across the street, that is. Then there was more than enough business for both of them. That is the nature of lawyers; the more of them there are, the merrier they get... the legal profession doesn't respond to the law of supply and demand. With lawyers, supply is demand.”
If Donald Kaul's theory that lawyers create their own demand is right, we're in trouble. Business Week reported in its August 6, 1990, issue that we have 760,000 attorneys licensed to practice in the United States, and almost half have been admitted to the bar since 1980. Why such growth? Because, consistent with the American Way, it's a pretty good way to make a buck.
Why is law so lucrative? In part because lawyers make too many of our laws, and in part because business and consumers overuse legal services.
If America falls to its knees, I'm convinced it will be because our society stymied itself through excessive litigation. Our 760,000 attorneys serve 250 million people. By comparison, Japan has 110,000 lawyers for a population of 125 million. Japan has half our population yet gets along with only 15 percent of our attorneys. Putting it another way, we have more than three times as many lawyers per capita as Japan.
That isn't the only unfavorable comparison. The U.S. also has three times as many attorneys per capita as Great Britain, 30 times as many malpractice claims and 100 times as many product claims.
We have developed a mentality that causes us to want compensation for everything that goes wrong in our lives. We bring suit for the wildest reasons, and, of course, there is always a lawyer willing to help. We can complain all day about ambulance-chasing attorneys creating societal problems just to make a living. But until we take a fundamentally different view of our legal system we're dead in the water.
Business, as one of the major consumers of legal services, needs to set the example in making our society less legalistic. Finding ways to use fewer legal services is the only way to set that example.
We have become too willing to hire a lawyer to do what we don't need a lawyer for. Communication is at the top of the list. When we have a disagreement with someone, our initial response is to hire a lawyer to talk to the other party. Why not do the talking ourselves? Did the attorney go to communication school . . . or to law school?
Our business sector spends millions upon millions of unnecessary dollars annually for legal services that are really communication services we should do for ourselves. Don't hire a mouthpiece. Have the courage to talk to the disagreeing party yourself. Approach the problem straight on, saving money, anxiety, and time.
Like business people, some lawyers are good, some not so good. Many have acceptable ethical standards, others don't. Legal profession ethics are no better or no worse than other cross sections of society. Some lawyers, however, do our society harm by seeking remuneration for actions not worthy of the effort. In the process, they hold institutions and individuals accountable for unrealistic performance standards.
Legal scholar Walter Olson, in his book The Litigation Explosion: What Happened When America Unleashed the Lawsuit, discusses at length the abuse of the legal system and how it is dragging our economy down. Although plaintiff lawyers may not agree with him, most citizens do. Simply put, we're going to court to right every possible wrong–except, of course, the wrong done to defendants hauled into court for frivolous reasons.
We can fix our legal cancer by following Canada in abolishing the contingency fee and making the losing courtroom opponent pay the fees of the winning side.
America suffers from a self-inflicted wound. We have too many attorneys. And the more work we give them, the more we're going to have. Do your leadership and our society a favor. Look aggressively for alternatives before calling a lawyer. Communicate . . . negotiate . . . but don't litigate.
Remember, when your attorney wins, everyone else loses.