The Unasked Question In Tech Policy: Where Do We Get The Lawyers?

Techdirt. 2021-03-02

Summary:

When we criticize Internet regulations like the CCPA and GDPR, or lament the attempts to roll back Section 230, one of the points we almost always raise is how unduly expensive these policy decisions can be for innovators. Any law that increases the risk of legal trouble increases the need for lawyers, whose services rarely come cheap.

But bare cost is only part of the problem. All too often, policymakers seem to assume an infinite supply of capable legal counsel, and it's an assumption that needs to be questioned.

First, there are not an infinite number of lawyers. For better or worse, the practice of law is a heavily regulated profession with significant barriers to entry. The legal industry can be fairly criticized, and often is, for making it more difficult and expensive to become a lawyer than perhaps it should be, but there is at least some basic threshold of training, competence, and moral character we should want all lawyers to have attained given the immense responsibility they are regularly entrusted with. These requirements will inevitably limit the overall lawyer population.

(Of course, there shouldn't be an infinite number of lawyers anyway. As discussed below, lawyers play an important role in society, but theirs is not the only work that is valuable. In the field of technology law, for example, our need for people to build new things should well outpace our need for lawyers to defend what has been built. We should be wary of creating such a need for the latter that the legal profession siphons off too much of the talent able to do the former.)

But even where we have lawyers we still need the right kind of lawyers. Lawyers are not really interchangeable. Different kinds of lawyering need different types of skills and subject-matter expertise, and lawyers will generally specialize, at least to some extent, in what they need to master for their particular practice area. For instance, a lawyer who does estate planning is not generally the one you'd want to defend you against a criminal charge, nor would one who does family law ordinarily be the one you'd want writing your employment manual. There are exceptions, but generally because that particular lawyer went out of their way to develop parallel expertise. The basic fact remains: simply picking any old lawyer out of the yellow pages is rarely likely to lead to good results; you want one experienced with dealing with the sorts of legal issues you actually have, substantively and practically.

True, lawyers can retrain, and it is not uncommon for lawyers to switch their focus and develop new skills and expertise at some point in their careers. But it's a problem if a disproportionate number start to specialize in the same area because, just as we need people available to work professions other than law, even within the law we still need other kinds of lawyers available to work on other areas of law outside these particular specialized areas.

And we also need to be able to afford them. We already have a serious "access to justice" problem, where only the most resourced are able to obtain legal help. A significant cause of this problem is the expense of law school, which makes it difficult for graduates to resist the siren call of more remunerative employment, but it's a situation that will only get worse if lawyer-intensive regulatory schemes end up creating undue demand for certain legal specializations. For example, as we increasingly pass a growing thicket of complex privacy regulations we create the need for more and more privacy lawyers to help innovators deal with these rules. But as the need for privacy lawyers outstrips the ready availability of lawyers with this expertise, it threatens to raise the costs for anyone needing any sort of lawyering at all. It's a basic issue of supply and demand: the more privacy lawyers that are needed, the more expensive it will be to attract them. And the more these lawyers are paid a premium to do this work, the more it will lure lawyers away from other areas that still need serving, thus making it all the more expensive to hire those who are left to help with it.

Then there is the question of where lawyers even get the expertise they need to be effective counsel in the first place. The dirty little secret of legal education is that, at least until recently, it probably wasn't at their law schools. Instead lawyers have generally been trained up on the job, and what new

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Authors:

Cathy Gellis

Date tagged:

03/02/2021, 19:27

Date published:

03/02/2021, 19:22