Right, like I said, you guys go all free market. Consult any legal quack you like, let the market sort it out. The ones who fall for suckers who have not been to law school or passed the bar, they will lose their money ortheir freedom, but hey, at least we will have the freedom to get our legal advice from anyone.
>
> What's more, I've never heard of a doctor presuming
> to charge a client an enormous hourly charge to go
> off to the library for many hours to educate
> themselves about the client's medical problem.
I leave that to the Drs, but I well tell you this, Bill: if a Dr has to do research on yr problem -- and it may happen now and then -- he's gonna change you the equivalent of an enormous hourly rate. He's not gonna do it for free.
As for lawyers, what you are paying for is in fact what you describe as our self-education. It is called legal reserach. We know how to do it, you don't. We know what's imporetant, you don't. We know how to present it, you don't. That's why people are willing to pay my perfectly ridicuously hourly rate.
And, incidentally, we do try to minimize costs even to out corporate clients by having a lot of basic reserach done by lower-billing associates. I do drafts before a senior partner looks at stuff.
Only
> lawyers suffer from the delusion that their clients
> should expect to be bled several hundred dollars an
> hour by an "expert" undertaking on-the-job training.
> If a doctor tried that, he would have his heart
> ripped from his chest. A doctor has to know how to
> perform the operation before he's allowed to do it,
> let alone allowed to charge for it.
You are, as usual, an arrogant and ignorant buffoon. Maybe you don't have medical residents in Australia. Myae your Drs come out of med school somehow knowing everything without havinbg worked on it. Somehow I doubt it.
>
> Representing yourself is, in some cases, legal. In
> other cases it isn't. In any event, as you point
> out, not everyone is up to representing themselves.
Almost no one one is. I haves een it done competently two or three times out of hundreds and hundreds of cases. The fact of the matter, Bill, is that what I do is really really difficult.
>
> Though it depends on how much money you have whether
> the quality of legal representation you can afford
> will turn out to be better than self-representation.
No, even a very bad lawyer is almost always better than none, even if the client is smarter than the lawyer. And sometimes poor clients get good lawyers, whether public interest or pro bono, or just good. A solo practitioner just won a patent case in in Chicago against Microsoft and its huge law firm (Sidley Austin Brown & Wood), scoring a judgment of more than a half billion dollars.
> Sometimes it is better to have a fool for a client
> than to have a fool for a lawyer. Personally I could
> never afford the sort of lawyer who would do a
> better job than I could do myself. A top lawyer
> would be worth the money, but I simply don't have
> the money so its moot.
No, you might have a case that a public interest or pro bono lawyer would take, you might find a good lawyer like the guy who won that case; I don't know if contingency fees are permitted in in AU, but in the US almost all plaintiff tort and civil rights work is done on contingency -- you don't pay unlessyou win -- and many of the lawyers are awesomely good.
A crap lawyer is worse than
> no lawyer. But because of the system, they get to
> charge ridiculous prices.
>
No, as I said, even a bad lawyer is almost always better than none. And it's not "the system" that enables charging high fees, but the relatively scarcity of legal talent. So, in a sense, the market system, but the monopoly of lawyers on thepractice of law has nothing to do with it. Getting rid of that wouldn't affect high end legal practice one jot.
jks
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