Million lawyers a legal nightmare

[emad]

Times
From Chris Ayres in Los Angeles



A NIGHTMARISH vision set out in 1985 by the American folk singer Tom Paxton has come true: the United States now has more than one million licensed lawyers.

The disclosure came after California enrolled its 200,000th lawyer this week, swelling the national ranks of the legal profession to 1,084,504, according to the American Bar Association. That is a 65 per cent increase since 1985.

Growth in the number of lawyers is unlikely to stop, with the celebrity trials of Michael Jackson and Robert Blake, along with lawyer-based television chat shows such as Larry King Live, creating huge interest in America’s criminal system.

Meanwhile, evidence of lawyers’ influence is everywhere, including liability-reducing stickers on toddlers’ pushchairs that warn parents to “remove child before folding”, or the case in which a man sued the police for not arresting him for public intoxication, thus allowing him to crash a car while driving drunk.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/newspaper/0,,175-1500707,00.html

[no_hypocrisy]

1. Lawyers are unlikely to be outsourced and will always depend

upon average citizens to subsidize their existence, if not corporations.

[Gabi Hayes]

2. first, let's kill ALL the lawyers, right? somebody said that once

then we can do away with ALL those pesky suits against corporate america, yes?

we can keep the corporate lawyers, so they can sue each other, and keep people from unionizing

sound like a good plan?

the crytpoprotoneofascista certainly do

[no_hypocrisy]

4. Neocons would have contracts out on only trial lawyers and

criminal defense attorneys, leaving the corporate entities and the benign "general practitioner" (closings for real estate, traffic) undisturbed.

And per Shakespeare's admonishment to kill all the lawyers, it sounds good on paper until you're the target of prosecution or persecution.

[Warpy]

3. Dunno about that

Paralegals are setting up their own companies to provide poor folks law.

Non courtroom law can easily be outsourced, especially corporate and tax law. All they need to do is set up correspondence law courses for lawyers in India and the Caribbean.

There really isn't that big a need for flashy defense attorneys.