It's not just about the number of lawyers, but also the cost to become one.

In the US, unlike many other countries, practicing law requires a graduate degree from an accredited school. This dramatically adds to the cost of a legal education, and drives up the price for everyone. This is the direct result of "regulatory capture of government protected guilds."

> the cost to become one

the cost of law school is a fixed (and by the time you become a lawyer, sunk) cost, and therefore has no bearing on supply decisions.

moreover, how does the cost of law school jack up prices in a world where there is an excess of lawyers? if you're a lawyer, do you charge the amount that covers your loans, or the amount that nets you the most profit?

the very fact that there are excess lawyers is evidence that regulation of who gets to become a lawyer is not increasing prices. now i'm not saying that lawyers are efficiently priced, merely that regulatory capture is not the reason for this.

There is an excess of lawyers in certain areas; an excess of IP lawyers doesn't map to an excess of divorce attorneys.

>if you're a lawyer, do you charge the amount that covers your loans, or the amount that nets you the most profit?

If all lawyers were interchangeable, your argument might hold, but the artificially high price of legal education leads to a misallocation of resources--The increased cost of student loans can cause lawyers to move into specialities that are higher paying, causing shortages in one area and surpluses in others.

> The increased cost of student loans can cause lawyers to move into specialities that are higher paying, causing shortages in one area and surpluses in others.

This is circular. You're arguing that shortages in some areas are causing higher prices, but then arguing that lawyers are leaving certain areas for the areas that pay higher salaries. You can't say that prices are high for corporate legal services because supply is restricted while saying that the high cost of legal education causes a surplus of lawyers in areas where salaries (i.e. prices) are the highest.

You can't make sense of the legal market by thinking of it in terms of regulation cutting off supply leading to higher prices. That is not the major operative force in the legal field.

The major operative force is branding, and that drives everything else. Companies pay substantial fees to hire firms with brands. Firms with brands pay substantial salaries to hire attorneys with brands.

There are 200+ ABA-accredited law schools, with 45,000 graduates each year. Only about 10-15% get a job working with a big firm that does corporate work. This is because at a big New York firm, fully a quarter of the new hires might come from Harvard and Yale, and 90% from the top 15 schools. Even with the high cost of legal education there is a huge untapped supply of attorneys who would jump at the chance to work for half as much as Harvard grads to do corporate work. There are no ABA restrictions to hiring these people to do corporate work. What there is is a lack of demand for lower-price lower with lesser credentials in that particular subset of the market.

>You can't say that prices are high for corporate legal services because supply is restricted

I'm not saying that. I agree with you that there is a surplus of corporate lawyers, and so deregulation wouldn't really reduce the price in that sector.

Even if there were cheap lawyers who learned through apprenticeship instead of law school, large companies still wouldn't hire them.

I'm talking about prices being driven up in other areas, where law school grads with insane debt don't want to work.

I know several law school grads who couldn't find the kind of high paying job they were looking for. However, since they had so much debt they ended up taking non legal jobs (one is a project manager, the other an entrepreneur), instead of moving into another lower paid area of the law.

Because of high education costs (and the requirement that lawyers posses a graduate degree, which means most of them are going to be at least 25 by the time they can start practicing, plus the psychological factors involved in having spent 7 years in school), there is a minimum price below which most lawyers will not work, and will seek other opportunities.

It doesn't make sense to concede that there is a high supply of lawyers and still argue that cost is driving up prices. The price of a service depends on the supply of the service and the demand curve. At a given level of supply, it is irrelevant what the cost of providing the service is, that will not change the cost.

It's valid to make the "guild" argument and say that the education requirement is driving up prices, but only if you argue that the education requirement is artificially restricting supply. When ABA-accredited schools are graduating about twice as many students as are getting hired, that's a difficult argument to make. Would salaries really go down if you added an entire category of potential hires below the current group that already isn't getting hired?

See my response to andylei below.

The supply of lawyers doesn't quite follow the simple market relationship either. The study and practice of law are still associated with some prestige, and the high cost of legal services leads many to believe that they'll quickly pay back their inflated student debt.

There definitely is regulatory capture going on. Small, more affordable schools are in a real bind over having to meet stringent and arbitrary accreditation criteria, but that doesn't affect the number of lawyers because students are willing to pay anything to become a lawyer anyway.