> It seems like you could hire a couple broke lawyers to fight patent trolls, and the cost wouldn't run into millions when your attorney books a ton of hours.

That's approximately like saying you could hire a couple of broke developers to build a software package upon which much of your company's success will depend. Both the 10X-productivity phenomenon [0] and the FizzBuzz Problem [1] can show up in law just as much as in software development.

[0] E.g., http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/179616/a-good...

[1] E.g., https://blog.codinghorror.com/why-cant-programmers-program/