Does America Have Too Many Lawyers?

Does the United States have too many lawyers? With the use of the preferred word of "attorney" for the legal profession, one must be careful to use the right word in describing one of America's most prestigious, and at the same time, hated professions, according to the NY Times.

For starters, you can't find a lawyer under the caption of "lawyers" in the Yellow Pages of a telephone book. You have to look under the section titled, "attorneys." To get an idea of the proliferation of attorneys in the U.S., try looking in the phone book of any size city, large or small, and see who has the most number of full page ads. Odds are, the attorney section of every telephone book across the country dominates the Yellow Pages to such an extent that there isn't even a close second category, save perhaps that of medical doctors. It is estimated that the U.S. has 70% of the world's attorneys, leaving the rest of the world with the remaining 30%. Given the overwhelming domination of the profession in the Yellow Pages and the sheer number of attorneys in America, is it any wonder that Americans have the most litigious society on the face of the planet?

Lawyer jokes abound and while many of them have become so familiar, just one is worth repeating. In the movie Back to the Future, Part II, Doc and Marty travel to the year 2015 in order to prevent Marty's son from joining the bad guy Griff in some sort of heist. The heist resulted in Marty's son going to jail and the event was determined to be the source of the family's troubles for years to come. But Doc and Marty fix the problem by intercepting Marty's son before the heist via time travel, and Marty plays the role of his son in order to meet with Griff. Marty tells Griff "No," then re-enacts the familiar scene from the first installment of Back to the Future in which Marty escaped from Griff's grandfather on a skateboard. In 2015, however, it's Griff who's chasing down Marty on a hoverboard, and misses him completely when trying to strike Marty with a baseball bat, and winds up smashing the windows of the Courthouse in Hill Valley, along with the members of Griff's gang. Marty's son is spared the future arrest by not participating in a robbery with Griff, and immediately a copy of USA Today that Doc had picked up showing Marty's son being jailed changes showing the arrest of Griff and his gang instead, ostensibly for damaging the windows of the Courthouse. The USA Today article explains that "within hours, Griff and his gang were tried and sentenced." Marty remarks, "Within hours?" To which Doc replies, "The justice system moves swiftly in the 21st century now that they've abolished all lawyers."

Which brings up a subtopic of sorts, and that is, how the justice system of today moves ever so slowly. Lawsuits on average take five or six years to get settled and the attorneys are always paid first. To get an idea of just how much a waste of time a lawsuit can be, consider a recently settled class action lawsuit involving Sprint, the telecommunications giant. Sprint has been cited in a recent survey as having some of the worst customer service on record in not just the telecommunications business, but among all businesses in general. They were sued in a class action suit and when the wheels of justice finally swung into action, former Sprint customers were notified by mail to call a toll free phone number to claim their settlement. The settlement involved the following choices: a $4.00 (that's right, FOUR dollars!) credit on each customer's phone bill, a whopping $10.00 credit in order to make long distance phone calls on the Sprint network, or your choice of a Sprint long distance calling card. This assumes, of course, that you're still a Sprint customer after all the frustration and headaches you've endured forced you to join in the class action suit. There was no outright cash settlement to any Sprint customers who endured the horrendous service, only credits on their bill and useless long distance calling cards. And if you were one of Sprint's former customers who switched telecommunications companies during the attorney's crusade for justice, you received nothing. This begs the question of whether the attorneys arguing this case on behalf of their clients would have accepted this kind of a deal for themselves as payment for their services. Another class action lawsuit involving a company offering a Mastercard credit card was sued in a class action case, and when that case finished its multiyear tenure in the courts, the plaintiffs or cardholders were awarded a whopping $5.00 (that's FIVE dollars) each.

If an average class action lawsuit takes three to five years and all the plaintiffs get are credits on their future bills, or $5.00 settlements, just what exactly are the attorneys doing? Many people have the perception that the attorneys will keep litigation going outside of a trial, through depositions, discovery and investigations, and when they've reached the point where the case is too expensive to try, or they've collected enough in fees, they settle. It's no surprise to most people who have gone through the legal process to recognize that the real winners in most court cases are the lawyers. Win or lose, the lawyer in a class action suit always gets paid.

A whole cottage industry has sprung up online via the internet where litigants represented by attorneys in certain types of litigation can now apply for loans against their expected settlement in order to pay their current expenses. The main requirements are that you must have counsel representing you (you can't represent yourself in order to qualify), and it usually must be a personal injury or breach of contract case. An attorney is likely to recommend to a client expected to wait a long time for his settlement to apply to one of these places so he can collect his fee. If this doesn't suggest that there are too many attorneys and too many lawsuits, it's hard to imagine what else could. The kicker is that these lenders claim that you don't have to pay them back if your attorney doesn't win your case. This means that a hard-money lender who loans money to a litigant, betting that that litigant is going to win a settlement, believes that they can make up any losses simply by wagering on a high percentage of their loans going to litigants who win. These lenders are always paid back out of the settlement when the litigant prevails, and perhaps out of the lawyer's back pocket if the litigant loses, because he can always make it up with the next case.

So in the final analysis, do we have too many attorneys in America? Consider this response made by many of America's teachers. In many school districts, teachers are pressured to join the teacher's union, usually in the form of the National Education Association. When many teachers are asked why they joined the NEA, aside from the intense peer pressure, you would think they would give reasons like, "for the betterment of education in my district," or "to keep up to date with the latest teaching methods," or even "to make sure I have someone bargaining on my behalf for a better salary." Nope, it isn't any of those reasons, although in front of their peers, this is what a teacher is likely to say. When a teacher isn't pressured to offer the politically correct reasons for joining the NEA, the number one reason they join is so that they will be protected in the event of a lawsuit. Teachers know that the NEA has lawyers that are immediately available if a situation such as disciplining a child develops. And when it does, the NEA has pledged to have an attorney come to the rescue, even to the point of going to the school where the trouble occurred. Most responsible teachers recognize the perils that could place their career in jeopardy as well as their retirement, and want to be protected in case a student or a parent decides to sue them.

Advertisements for attorneys during soap operas or late night television seeking clients for personal injury or class action lawsuits abound. The Yellow Pages of any phone book feature some of the nicest, full color ads for their services that make virtually all of the other occupations look like paupers by comparison. Regarding the class action suits, who can forget such topics as toxic shock syndrome, mesothelioma, tobacco or asbestos exposure? Malpractice insurance has driven obstetricians out of business in some states because of the litigation risk. If we don't have too many attorneys, the case can certainly be made that we have our share of them and that they aren't hard to find. Paying for one's services may be another matter.