Here, if you go to court, either civil or criminal, you of course need a lawyer. I don't see how that is substantially different from the way it works in the US. And the UK, which also is a common law country, has a much lower amount of lawyers per capita than the US.
One explanation for the difference is of course that the US is a very litigious society, resulting in more legal proceedings than elsewhere, and that might be hard to change. But to me it appears the americans in general use lawyers for trivial matters like divorces or wills or entering into contracts or buying property or whatever, and if the cost of lawyers were to increase sharply, I think that americans would be able to discover ways to do those things without lawyers, just like the rest of the world is doing perfectly fine already.