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| Americans shy away from Lawyers due to high costs |
| 2008-07-16 |
| (Xinhua) -- High cost of lawyers' fees has resulted to a rise of Americans handling their own court cases, with assistance from legal self-help sites and groups, a research group said Tuesday. The kind of self-handled cases has gone beyond civil cases involving small amounts of money to domestic problems, divorces and child custody matters, according to the National Center for State Courts. To help Americans without lawyers, all 50 states and the District of Columbia have set up self-help centers. An indicator of the growing acceptance of self-handled litigation is the 43,000 emails, phone and walk-in inquiries received in 2007 by the Hennepin County Self-Help Center in Minnesota. It is the largest number since the program started 11 years ago. In San Diego, California, the number of unrepresented party in cases pending before the family court went up 70 percent in 2004 from 54 percent in the early 1990s. A 2004 study by the New Hampshire Supreme Court task force said85 percent of civil cases in district court and 48 percent in superior court were tried without lawyers. |
| Posted by:Fred |
| #7 Yes ed, but if both those professions cleaned their own house far more effectively and efficiently we wouldn't have an inviting environment that nurtures so many of the blighters either. |
| Posted by: Procopius2k 2008-07-16 18:24 |
| #6 Something is terribly wrong when a society has more lawyers than doctors and police combined. |
| Posted by: ed 2008-07-16 15:02 |
| #5 The university I went to produced about 40 civil engineers in a good year, and churned out about 200 lawyers in the same period. That's 5 lawyers to hover over every CE like vultures waiting for you to make an error of any kind. You'd think those c*cksuckers would go broke with as many of them as there are. |
| Posted by: bigjim-ky 2008-07-16 11:24 |
| #4 This has been building up for many years. Phoenix, long ago, installed a kiosk divorce-vending machine for no-contest amiable divorces, over the bitter protestations of lawyers. |
| Posted by: Anonymoose 2008-07-16 10:19 |
| #3 If the story of Sodom and Gamorha(?) was about lawyers, would we have any left? Might be a close call. |
| Posted by: Richard of Oregon 2008-07-16 09:44 |
| #2 Vespasian, not all. It's the 95% of them giving a bad name to the rest. |
| Posted by: Spike Uniter 2008-07-16 02:21 |
| #1 Good! The fewer lawyers we have the better. Parasites all. |
| Posted by: Vespasian Threremp1622 2008-07-16 00:53 |