Where Have All The Lawyers Gone?

Recently, I have spoken to a Justice and two experienced attorneys about their observations that there seem to be few new attorneys engaged in the court work in several of Maine’s more rural counties.

The Justice noted that after many years of absence from the bench in the Somerset County, he went up there to handle a trial docket. He was quite surprised to see that the same attorneys were practicing in the court who were practicing there ten or more years ago. There were new attorneys representing the state, but the same attorneys were there who would been there for many years representing the private litigants. He was really quite surprised.

Also, I recently spoke to two experienced practitioners, one in Lincoln County and one in Waldo County. Both were saying the same thing. That is the experienced litigators were becoming fewer and fewer, and new attorneys were not coming into the county to take their place.

I asked them why they thought they were seeing that. There were a number of reasons, and to none of them could they assign a particular percentage.

One reason is that court appointments pay so little money that more experienced attorneys simply cannot afford to take those cases on as they do not offer enough to cover one’s overhead, and there is little money in them to attract new attorneys who might seek them as a way of building up their practice, as many of us did in the past. I know from my own experience that in terms of real dollars, court appointments were paying better in the 1980's than they are in 2010. The same cannot be said for judicial and clerk salaries over the same period.

Another reason is simply the complexity of cases today and the difficulty attorneys experience when they are subject to endless trailing trial calendars, docket calls, case management conferences and so forth. And also there are now more forms, and new ones popping up all the time. We all understand that. Twenty years ago, many simple divorce files were perhaps a half-inch thick. Today, by the time one gets done with even a fairly simple case is going to be three or four times that size in terms of the amount of paper, and therefore the cost of pursuing the case..

Maybe it is that the amount of time that one has to put in on a case and the costs of that time to a client have simply made dealing with many small matters untenable. I remember discussing this issue with an experienced practitioner here in Kennebec County a few years ago. We both agreed that it probably was not cost-effective to bring a lawsuit in the District Court for an amount less than $15,000 in a case we knew would be hotly contested. $15,000!

So where are the disputes going? Well, I think they are still going into the courthouse, but they are going into the courthouse without attorneys. Years ago it was somewhat unusual to see a pro se litigant in the Superior Court, and today it is very common. In family matters, I think the Family Law Magistrates spend 80% of their day dealing with cases where neither party is represented by an attorney.

Of course, this makes things all the more difficult for the courts. People come in with little or no idea of what they are doing or how to go about it. This leads to wasting time on a grand scale.

So, where have all the lawyers gone? Here in the State of Maine where the largest employer is the State of Maine, a lot of them are in state government. Lawyers are also now working in other enterprises in increasing numbers. But it seems, unless and until things change dramatically (an event I am not holding my breath for), there will be a diminishing of the number of lawyers in our local courts representing private clients.

I would like to hear from anyone who agrees or disagrees with me on any of the above.