Remove all private lawyers, and make them public defenders.
Posted by Far-Fill-4717@reddit | CrazyIdeas | View on Reddit | 99 comments
This includes both civil and criminal cases. All lawyers will receive intense training such that every lawyer is a 'good' lawyer. All lawsuits are free, but frivolous lawsuits are more tightly clamped down upon. This way, if a poor person tries to sue a rich person, or a small company tries to sue a big company, they both get the same quality of service
u__________________-@reddit
But money
ericbythebay@reddit
Public defenders don’t do civil trials.
Far-Fill-4717@reddit (OP)
This new form would have all the lawyers + the current public defenders taking on civil trials as well.
Impossible-Emu-8756@reddit
It seems you know very little about the legal profession, and that is ok. Think of lawyers like doctors, they have very specialized knowledge in thier area of practice. You would never have your heaet doctor (Cardiologist) to be your cancer doctor (Oncologist) or your OB/GYN. To do those jobs requires far too much knowledge on that specific area.
ericbythebay@reddit
Who would pay for discovery and expert witnesses?
1714alpha@reddit
Would it matter if they all got the same resources allocated?
deleted_by_reddit@reddit
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LamoTheGreat@reddit
What do these lawyer do? Are the doing a bunch of non-court stuff? I have no idea what lawyers really do other than big time court stuff.
rubiconsuper@reddit
Lawyers who don’t do court do transactional work. Negotiating deals, advising, estate planning, intellectual property, drafting legal documents, real estate, and more.
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pandymen@reddit
Who decides who gets resources? If everyone gets some paltry sum, you are just enabling corporate malfeasance. Complicated cases would lose by default.
Lawsuits like the ones covered in films such as Dark Waters or Erin Brokovich would be doomed to fail as they would not be given sufficient resources in such a system.
1714alpha@reddit
Yeah, equality is not equity. Some cases would take more resources to adequately defend or prosecute.
Laserlight_jazz@reddit
me
CadenVanV@reddit
That’s a terrible idea. Every lawyer has their own specialties. You’re doing the equivalent of turning all doctors into surgeons and then telling them that they need to also do all the other roles even if they don’t specialize in them.
Defense lawyers have a specific role to play, that’s entirely separate from prosecutors, big corporate lawyers, personal injury lawyers, small claims, insurance, contracts, real estate, and all the other specialties.
Ancient_Broccoli3751@reddit
Imagine if every single lawyer spent their life defending the poor, the weak, and the helpless. It seems most of them are doing the exact opposite.
Megalocerus@reddit
Plenty of lawyers do contract law or wills and trusts, and don't try cases. Is that allowed in this attack on freedom?
spudmarsupial@reddit
"Attack on freedom" 🤣
Why is it that even the slightest curtailing of the infinite, unfettered, power of weath is an attack on "freedom".
I want to hear your definition of "freedom" in a society that has more than one person in it.
Wise_Willingness_270@reddit
The ability to do whatever the fuck I want when it does not have a material effect on someone else.
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raiderh808@reddit
Not have the entity trying to put me in prison also choose the person trying to stop it from happening.
LamoTheGreat@reddit
I love the general OP idea but if that were to happen I would imagine 90% of the good lawyers will leave the country or kinda work under the table somehow, or be bribed to win or lose. Paying a higher compensation package (privately or publicly, meaning almost as much as they’d make privately) makes them less likely to accept bribes or find any other way to make the 10x money they could potentially make in another country. Now if the whole world did it, and/or if I’m wrong for some reason, I’d be very happy about it and I’d love to try it. Maybe I am wrong, I don’t know.
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Megalocerus@reddit
Lawyers should be able to freely pick their specialty. Training cannot make all lawyers equal and they don't all have the same personality, so people may want to pick freely.
Right now, Massachusetts is having a crisis for underpaying contract public defenders; there may wind up a shortage so that criminal defendants have a get out of jail free card, but that's another problem with your plan.
ericbythebay@reddit
Because this is an attack on freedom of association, right to contract, and for criminal cases, one’s right to self defense.
VictoriousRex@reddit
99% of lawyers aren't making the money you think they are. Those who do probably already has generational wealth.
Not_Campo2@reddit
This just says you have zero idea what lawyers do lmao. You know less than 3% of law school grads go into criminal law? Did you know that’s because most legal work has nothing to do with criminal work?
Ignoring all that, the best lawyers aren’t lawyers who can practice in a bunch of different specialties, they’re the ones who are really really good in a single practice area that they’ve spent decades learning the ins and outs of. Just because you’re in expert in property rights and water law doesn’t mean you’d be at all adequate, even with intense training, to practice criminal law. For a lot of lawyers, it’s been decades since they’ve even sat in a Crim or CivPro class, and 99% of lawyers haven’t spoken in a court room since their mock trial days.
No-Carpenter-8315@reddit
Sooo... how do they get paid?
Shallow-Thought@reddit
“Subsidize the entire justice and litigation system so it’s 1/4 as efficient and 3x as costly. But it’s tax money, so out of sight out of mind.”
MajesticBread9147@reddit
I'm curious why you think that things will be less efficient just because they're publicly run?
CadenVanV@reddit
Because lawyers have specialties and you can’t have them all doing a little of everything or doing roles they aren’t educated in. A personal injury lawyers has no place in a criminal court or in any other courtroom that isn’t a personal injury case. If you throw all lawyers together into a single “public defender” category, you’re making them all do everything poorly instead of each doing one thing very well.
BornAgain20Fifteen@reddit
That's a good point, but devil's advocate here. Isn't that the same for government-run healthcare? You have medical professionals working in different specialties as well and they still practice in only their specialty
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The_Bjorn_Ultimatum@reddit
Because everything publically run is less efficient. There is no incentive to make it efficient, like there is with private business.
Hefty-Reaction-3028@reddit
Yes there is incentive. It would cost less and you'd be less likely to be unfunded.
The_Bjorn_Ultimatum@reddit
That isn't an incentive to run the store well.
Hefty-Reaction-3028@reddit
If you get fired for being inefficient, yes it absolutely is
The_Bjorn_Ultimatum@reddit
What? That has absolutely nothing to do with the incentive we are talking about. Profit motive is what drives people to make goods and services cheaper and/or better. There is no incentive to do that in a gov run business, because funding will make up any deficiency of sale funds. You don't have to turn a profit for the business to survive, so the business ends up running itself into the ground because there is no incentive to maintain it. Look at Sun Fresh Market in Kansas City, if you want to see what happens when gov runs a business.
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Canotic@reddit
This is just not true.
The_Bjorn_Ultimatum@reddit
It is. But I apparently can't say any arguements about it because they all are getting automod deleted for being off topic, lol.
Canotic@reddit
No, it literally isn't. It's an American axiom but it doesn't hold true in the real world. Lots of private companies are inefficient as hell, often because they are privately run, and many public organizations are super efficient.
The_Bjorn_Ultimatum@reddit
Private enterprise that is inefficient dies out. That's how markets work.
Public organizations are not efficient. You are incorrect.
Canotic@reddit
Example: US Healthcare is private. Swedish health care is public. Compare the two and report back.
The_Bjorn_Ultimatum@reddit
US healthcare is heavily regulated. The admin, spurred on by regulations, has blown up massively and caused things to become expensive. That market is far from free. If we reduced the regs, we would see much better outcomes.
Canotic@reddit
Your argument was that private is always more efficient. Nothing about free market. So, is the private healthcare sector in the US more efficient that the mostly public sector in Sweden?
Also, it sounds like you're claiming the swedish health care sector is less regulated than the US one?
The_Bjorn_Ultimatum@reddit
Well when an industry is regulated heavily, like healthcare, it makes it waaay less efficient. That is gov intrusion into the private sector. In this case, it is so much regulation that it is essentially partially public.
No. In fact, this half and half system we have makes it even worse. As far as the actual healthcare itself goes, we have it better. The admin system surrounding it is what is worse when it is half and half. The solution is to reduce these hamstringing regulations.
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drunk_haile_selassie@reddit
Then why is it that every single publicly funded service that is privatised becomes more expensive?
The incentive, as you call it, leads to overcharging clients, cutting the pay and hours of the workers and cutting the quality of the very service they are providing.
The primary goal of a private business is to make money. The primary goal of public service is to provide said service.
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Ateist@reddit
That's not even remotely true.
Every time "inefficient" public utility is privatized it turns out to have been massively underfunded and being like 10 times more effective per dollar spent than the new "effective" private company.
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pakeke_constructor@reddit
Only CadenVanV has answered this well so far, I also want to quickly add one last point: "accountability"
In private sector, If a law firm does poorly or is dumb, people will stop using them as lawyers. Therefore, they will lose market-share and be "replaced" by other (better) law firms.
Likewise, if a law firm is really smart and does well, they will expand, or people will copy them.
The best word for this is "accountability", the bad lawyers and bad organization has been held accountable for their ineffectiveness.
This doesn't often occur in the public sector, if something is bad, it's just... bad, and it stays that way. No accountability
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Shallow-Thought@reddit
Publicly funded means it must be publicly approved. Which means each issue must be opened for public comment. Which means a landlord suing for back rent or a driver suing an uninsured motorist has to get public approval for their case to proceed. Anyone requesting a lawyer to try to knock down a speeding ticket needs public approval. That can’t happen quickly.
Ethan-Wakefield@reddit
You could just create a system where the lose of a lawsuit has to pay the legal fees of the winner. Maybe add a cap. But you don’t need this radical of a change to give poorer people legal representation.
WetRocksManatee@reddit
The biggest issue is that even in criminal law lawyers have specialties. For example if you wish to take a legitimate self defense argument you really need a lawyer well versed at self defense as being an affirmative defense it requires a completely different approach from claiming you are innocent.
Within civil law it is even more specialized. I had a civil suit that required two different lawyers to collect, one to win the trail and another to do the foreclosure on their business real estate because they refused to pay.
And there are civil rights law firms that take cases to achieve particular goals like the ACLU, the Institute for Justice, the Second Amendment Foundation, et al. In your scenario where the state controls the lawyers they could make these cases impossible. They could decide for example that some of IJ's goals like ending qualified immunity and civil asset forfeiture to be frivolous.
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Visual_Refuse_6547@reddit
The big problem here is that, as it is, wealthy people and corporations who wish to sue someone bear the cost of the lawsuit themselves. This idea would shift that cost to the public.
Hefty-Reaction-3028@reddit
The reason that wealthy people/corps are the ones to do it is that noone else has the money, even if they have a good cause to sue
Funding it publicly would cost public money but theoretically even out the playing field
Visual_Refuse_6547@reddit
I don’t disagree with this, but that’s also not the heart of my point.
I’d be ok with public civil attorneys. But OP says we should get rid of private attorneys altogether. I’m saying we should still have private attorneys for those who can afford them, so that those who can afford to bear the costs of their suit won’t be using public money to do so.
GoBeWithYourFamily@reddit
And then we will have a lawyer shortage because why would they want to be public defenders making public defender pay instead of corporate lawyers making millions per deal?
Few_Peak_9966@reddit
You'd have no lawyers left.
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TheRoadsMustRoll@reddit
sure. but when i have a case my attorney wants a tip. up front. and if i don't pay the tip they'll go over to the opposing party who will tip them well. and just like that; lawsuits aren't free anymore.
WTFisThaInternet@reddit
Among the many reasons this is a terrible idea, you take away the person's right to pick who their lawyer is, which is a fairly fundamental right.
spudmarsupial@reddit
Let them pick their lawyer but make lawyers public services like the post office instead of private industries.
No part of the law should be a private industry simply due to it's purpose and nature.
ericbythebay@reddit
Why can’t I have my own ethics counsel?
spudmarsupial@reddit
$$$
Basically if something is paywalled then it is forbidden to anyone poor. Justice is a bad thing to deny to the majority of the population.
tlrmln@reddit
How much would you pay them?
Rstar2247@reddit
So basically you eliminate the financial gain, raise the bar for entry(along with costs) and expect this to function? This would make the legal system suck even more than it does.
idontknowjuspickone@reddit
Most lawyers don’t litigate you realize right?
renecade24@reddit
You'd have a serious shortage of lawyers in a few years if they were all expected to go into six figures of debt to make a public defender's salary.
VictoriousRex@reddit
We already aren't getting paid enough, were talking like 3000 monthly payments to stay ahead
beastpilot@reddit
Does this assume lawyers don't currently get "intense" training?
_u_deleted_@reddit
Make public defenders district attorneys
OrthodoxAnarchoMom@reddit
Opera voice dismissed! Dismissed! Dismissed! Everything is dismissed!
mkosmo@reddit
You don't want that.
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JustDoItPeople@reddit
Yes, there's no way that states would underfund public defenders the way they currently do.