Decency and propriety? What do you even mean by that? That you think the proper rate for legal work should be lower than the current market rate? What basis do you have for such a claim?
One could very easily argue that these barriers to entry lead to pricing pressure and artificial scarcity that has no direct relationship to the "current market rate". I'm only recently becoming familiar with this topic, as it's one of those things that Just Is. But, the more I learn about it, the more hesitant I become to just write off high legal fees as a result of a free market. And, the more I wonder why it is that lawyers, of all people, receive such a strong defense against competition...it couldn't possibly be that the majority of politicians are also lawyers, many of whom will return to practice after holding office, could it?
Note that I'm not arguing against the idea that a great attorney is deserving of high rates, merely the idea that attorneys fees represent anything like an actual free market rate.
Just like most other industries, it's experience, deep knowledge of their field and skill that commands the high prices.
It's market driven because, despite $500/hour rates, you can still find a lawyer for $50. Both of whom passed the Bar but they're massively different in terms of their knowledge and experience.
Edit: one more thing, if you're looking for professional legal help from someone who couldn't pass the "barrier" of the Bar exam, you're probably going to get poor legal advice.
I'm genuinely not anti-lawyer. But, I can't help but think the system we have has many unintended consequences, and contributes to a legal system in which only the very wealthy can participate in a meaningful way. This may explain why, for example, polluters always seem to end up in the neighborhoods of poor people. If they set up shop next to a billionaire, they'd be sued out of existence; poor folks simply don't have the funds to fight a big legal battle like that. I'm pretty sure the bar is not the biggest cause of any of this, but it does seem obvious to me that disallowing anyone other than members of the bar from participating directly in the legal process definitely manipulates the market.
I wasn't arguing that Google should've used cheaper lawyers -- I believe the costs across the entire legal industry are ridiculously inflated, for multiple reasons. Like health care, there are a lot of elements in play and it's hard to pin any single thing down and say "this is the magic bullet", even though, also like the medical industry, there are a handful of major, easily identifiable "indecencies" in the legal industry. Note also that one can say the current costs of medicine simply represent "the current market rate" and that these services are worth what people are paying for them (and in medicine, that's more likely to be true than legal services, though the exorbitance there isn't justified either).
By "decency and propriety", I guess I mean "someone whose perspective is such that a fair analysis of the real value of the services provided by lawyers can be assessed", i.e., from the perspective of a basic decent person. I understand this perspective can become foggy as one accustoms to the rates commonly charged by legal professionals, or worse, becomes a legal professional themselves, without necessarily losing decency in the general sense -- it is just that this person's "decency gland" (as it pertains to the price of lawyers) has been forced into submission in order to retain and/or provide a significant amount of legal services.
Yes, I think a "proper rate" for legal work would be less than the $250/hr baseline that all of the attorneys in my area charge, just as I think a proper rate for the stitch-up of a cut should be less than the $3,300 an uninsured friend was recently charged (for him, over a month of wages. He spent less than two hours in the ER).
A few among these: the general requirement to obtain a classical JD from an accredited law school (a few states have partial exceptions to this) in order to sit for the bar, which places a debt burden upon the new lawyer usually at least equivalent to a mortgage, rigidity and verbosity of the court system, including rules that specifically exclude self-representation and impose needlessly onerous paperwork requirements, paywalls imposed by legal references if not by the court system itself (variable by state), and of course, the realization among lawyers that people rarely have a realistic option not to pay you or one of your direct competitors, so even if explicit collusion does not occur, there is an implicit price floor that no one is willing to break lest they invoke a "race to the bottom" (a function of the serious prohibitive barriers to entry that prevent new blood from coming and breaking this floor).
Why can't the loads of unemployed recent JDs swoop in and take over the market? Because like most recent grads in other fields, these JDs don't have any idea what they're doing and can't supply seriously meaningful services at any rate.
Market rates propped up by having the ability to restrict entry into the market controlled by other lawyers.
In my opinion the real reason is that some areas of law like patent litigation require highly specialiced knowledge that is almost impossible to acquire outside of a few special firms. An unexperienced law school graduate trying to do patent litigation would be like a med school graduate trying to do brain surgery - it just isn't feasible without years of additional training by someone who is already an expert in the field. But while after medical school this is provided by the residency programs at hospitals, all that exists for lawyers is starting as an associate at specialized for-profit biglaw firms - who have no interest in "teaching" as many people as possible, but raher in maximizing their billing rates...
$250+/hr is the common baseline rate in my area for real commercial legal services (that is, more than emailing a template for a contract), not the "A class rate", and I would guess areas with higher cost of living are worse off. I have associates that pay $450-$500+/hr for their legal help. I know of lawyers that charge $750+/hr; that, you may say, is the "A class" rate for lawyership. Note the disparity between development consultancies and legal firms -- we max out near a law firm's minimum rate.
Comparison to other highly-skilled professionals, like developers, is indeed valuable, but only further demonstrates the exorbitance of legal pricing.
You can start coding for hire right out of high school, if you've done the right prep work. It takes ~7 years before you can start practicing law.
I would argue that at least 50% of programmers out there are not 'highly-skilled professionals,' being neither highly skilled nor professional.
We want a system that produces the fairest outcomes possible, and there's more than one way unfair outcomes can be produced. Under the current system, if I had a patent and Oracle infringed upon it, I would be denied justice because I don't have $100M of cash to pay to litigate.
If we had a German-style fixed fee system where any patent dispute could be resolved for a flat fee of (say) $20,000 I would not be denied justice. The rich would not have an advantage over the poor in court. On the other hand, this would deny Google and Oracle the opportunity to spend 5,000 times as much to get the dispute analyzed in (what was presumably) a great deal of detail. Is that a bigger injustice than the fact I couldn't receive justice at all?
Personally I see this Oracle/Google dispute as like Bastiat's parable of the broken window - this case represents a net loss to society of $100,000,000+ as surely as if Oracle and Google had broken one another's office windows to the value of a hundred million dollars.
It is currently written in legalese and executed by a judge. This does not consistently produce the same result for the same inputs at different locations in spacetime. If it did produce the same results, we would not need lawyers or judges to determine what was legal; we could simply make API calls and evaluate functions.
You could only realize a vision like this in a new country, but that is what seasteading is for.
I would offer Strong AI-complete as a counter suggestion.
It isn't a free market however. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Admission_to_the_bar_in_the_Uni...