Fuzzy Economics and Legal Fees

The New York Times has published several articles in the last two months targeting the American Bar Association. In October, Clifford Winston questioned the need for bar exams and professional licensing. Last week, David Segal wrote "For Law Schools, a Price to Play the A.B.A.’s Way" which blames the ABA's control over law school accreditation for overly high legal fees.In that article, he writes

...The lack of affordable law school options, scholars say, helps explain why so many Americans don’t hire lawyers.

“People like to say there are too many lawyers,” says Prof. Andrew Morriss of the University of Alabama School of Law. “There are too many lawyers who charge $300 an hour. There aren’t too many lawyers who will handle a divorce at a reasonable rate, or handle a bankruptcy at a reasonable rate. But there is no way to be that lawyer and service $150,000 worth of debt.”

This helps explain a paradox: the United States churns out roughly 45,000 lawyers a year, but survey after survey finds enormous unmet need for legal services, particularly in low- and middle-income communities...

This reasoning doesn't make sense to me. It may be true that lawyers are driven to make more money in order to pay off student loans. But, high fees are not the only way to make lots of cash; there is also the low-cost, high-volume strategy (think Walmart). If so much unmet demand for legal services exists, it could be more profitable to charge a lower hourly rate and just work faster or put a little less effort into each case. This wouldn't be practical if the supply of lawyers is artificially restricted, but given the 45,000 new lawyers every year as well as reportedly high numbers of unemployed or idle lawyers, a shortage seems to be unlikely.

Even if the ABA does drive up the cost of law school tuition, that alone can't explain why legal fees are so high. I'd hypothesize that clients pay lawyers a premium wage in order to ensure a high level of effort. As it is hard to monitor an attorney's effort directly, better wages are used as an incentive to keep on the job instead of slacking. In the economics literature, this is referred to as an efficiency wage; the concept has been used to explain why wages remain rigid during periods of high unemployment. That seems to apply quite easily to the legal industry.

I'm sympathetic to the argument for lowering entry barriers to practicing law, but there are other factors at work too which cause lawyer wages to be high. Otherwise, competition in the legal industry would have already driven down prices and serviced the unmet needs in low- and middle-income communities.