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<p>Are you saying you think there’s an army of under-employed attorneys spending large amounts of time prosecuting frivolous cases?</p>
<p>Considering how many people out there right now claim to have been duped into an unreasonable mortgage or into buying a home they can’t afford, I think everyone should have to hire an attorney in order to close on the purchase of a home. </p>
<p>Why? There are so many documents that need to be signed at a residential real estate closing, particularly where a mortgage is involved, that it can be overwhelming even for the most intelligent people who simply don’t have experience closing real estate transactions. It is a good thing to have an attorney telling you what is standard and what is not. It is a good thing to have an attorney explaining to you all of the mortgage disclosures (mandated by the federal government) that outline in pretty exacting detail exactly what the terms of the mortgage mean with respect to payments, interest rate and interest rate adjustments. </p>
<p>Perhaps if attorneys were explaining these things to clients we wouldn’t have so many people who are absolutely shocked to find out that their oh-so-affordable mortgage is going to reset to a market rate.</p>
<p>Or perhaps we should require all potential homeowners to complete a course on home ownership 101 before signing up to a mortgage, and the day-to-day costs of home ownership?</p>
<p>No – even better – perhaps we should continue to allow homeowners who choose not to use attorneys to rely on their very conflicted real estate brokers for advice at their closing?</p>
<p>Or we could focus on making the law simpler? No, that wouldn’t work.</p>
<p>Sally:</p>
<p>I might buy your argument if those states that require a lawyer for RE closings had lower foreclosures…do you have any data to support that they do?</p>
<p>Take for example, Virginia, (one of a handful? of states) where a RE close requires a JD. Despite containing Northern Virginia, a region with the lowest unemployment rate in the nation (thanks to the new Congress), VA still has the 16th highest foreclosure rate in the US. If JDs were adding so much value, shouldn’t it be lower? a lot lower?</p>
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<p>How exactly would you make the law simpler?</p>
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I’d look first at other nations that survive with far less lawyers than we do. I’d probably start copying quite a bit of their practices.</p>
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<p>Fine, so please look now and tell me exactly how you would make the law simpler.</p>
<p>Since we are talking about real estate closings, please tell me how you would change the law of real property to make it simpler.</p>
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No thank you. On my priority list of things to do it’s far easier to write a ~45 second message board post than learn Japanese and see how their legal system is structured. Give me a break.</p>
<p>See, this is what policy makers should be doing. Our policy makers have no incentive to actually reduce legal services as a percentage of GDP, because that’d just be hurting some of their most powerful constituents.</p>
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<p>I’m asking you only to back up your implicit claim, which is that something significant could be accomplished by simplifying the law. </p>
<p>However, you cannot point to even a single law and describe how you would simplify it.</p>
<p>It seems to me your claim is analagous to someone who knows very little about cars, who looks under the hood of a car, and insists that there must be some way to make it simpler so that the car will be a lot cheaper to manufacture and maintain.</p>
<p>The fact is that the law is necessarily complex and most of the complexity would be very difficult to excise given what the law is intended to accomplish.</p>
<p>In the same way, a modern car is necessarily complex given the goals of fuel efficiency; emissions control; safety; and so on.</p>
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<p>There must be. Have you looked at the yellow pages recently? Watched daytime TV? Seen the ads for class action lawsuits in every newspaper? Heard of the websites SueEasy & WhoCanISue.com?</p>
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<p>Spoken like a true lawyer :rolleyes:</p>
<p>So, your point is that we can not learn from the legal structures of other countries? Countries that have less lawyers per capita than the US?</p>
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<p>It’s very easy to test. The next time you are unhappy about something, for example you get laid off from a job, just call one of these lawyers up and tell them you are interested in suing even though you have no evidence of any law being broken. Then see whether or not they will take your case on contingency.</p>
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<p>No, that’s not my point.</p>
<p>^^^
They’ll obviously only do contingency if they smell a payoff. Call them and tell them you want to sue your contractor. In no time, your legal bill will exceed the damages you’re looking to recover.</p>
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<p>Exactly, which is why I turn away anyone who calls me with a frivolous case. And why the vast majority of cases filed are in fact not frivolous.</p>
<p>wow. i feel like i stirred this place up…</p>
<p>Japan has a much smaller bar than the U.S. But for every lawyer in Japan, there are probably a dozen people with law degrees who are doing jobs that generally require bar membership in the U.S. - drafting contracts for corporations, for example. Simply comparing the number of members of the bar in one country versus another tells you little.</p>
<p>I worked for a law firm in Asia that had ten partners; only one of them was a member of the bar.</p>
<p>Being a lawyer seems like a job that is a back-up plan for a lot of people. If they don’t really know what they want to do career-wise, they just say that they will go to law school. This isn’t the case for all lawyers, obviously, but the profession seems to attract a segment of people who don’t know what else to do.</p>
<p>Apparently Japan is closer to the British than the US system.</p>
<p>A Solicitor handles civil matters lke contracts. </p>
<p>A Barrister pleads cases before the Bar, i.e. in court.</p>
<p>In the US both are referred to as attorneys or simply lawyers.</p>
<p>Discussion in a US law professor’s blog about how many “lawyers” there are in Japan:</p>
<p>“…[M]uch of the cocktail party value of the Japanese lawyer-counting comparison was always vastly overstated. Worse, the myth of the purported figure–-Japan has only like 25,000 attorneys in a country half our size while we have millions–-has fueled policy debates and lawyer bashing in the U.S. as Japan’s low-attorney-emission society is presented as driving a superior economic engine…</p>
<p>“All of this counting does not work if the analog bengoshi is not the only legal actor with a law degree that does basically ‘law’ work in Japan. And it should not be surprising in any civil law society that the core legal actors are not private practitioners representing multiple clients independently, but rather a huge number and variety of legal workers in government, corporations, and institutions doing the bulk of legal work in a system not driven by the advocacy model we use. Judges, prosecutors, legal bureaucrats, court employees, notaries, law professors, salarymen in the law department–-they all really matter. Public and corporate employment of the legal work force is at much higher rate than we are used to, and much of the heavy lifting of legal work, including even litigation and administrative work, is done by unlicensed legal professionals trained in law school. Yet if the estimate for Japan included all who perform lawyerly functions in other countries, the ratio is similar to modern countries in Europe (nearly 1200:1). Indeed, Japan’s law schools—eighty of them and not just the institute which produces bengoshi—graduate approximately 37,000 students per year. This is comparable to the output of U.S. law schools. Admittedly their “law school” is an undergraduate degree in law, as with almost all other nations besides ours. Yet if even a healthy fraction of those graduates do what we would consider the practice of law, the stereotype count of 15,000 to 25,000 total lawyers in Japan breaks down, along with the policy implications it fuels in public discourse and cocktail parties.”</p>
<p>[Legal</a> Profession Blog: Japanese Lawyers Set to Explode by 3150%](<a href=“http://lawprofessors.typepad.com/legal_profession/2006/10/japanese_lawyer.html]Legal”>http://lawprofessors.typepad.com/legal_profession/2006/10/japanese_lawyer.html)</p>