I got a semi-serious traffic ticket in Colorado in 2014, but I lived in California. I forgot about the ticket, and remembered a couple years later. I wanted to clear up the situation, but navigating the court system from a different state was challenging. I decided hiring an attorney local to the area would be easier than traveling to Colorado.
I called maybe 6 to 8 attorneys, and they fell into three categories: too expensive, too inexperienced, or just right.
Too expensive sounded like “we’ll need a $2000 retainer to even look at your case.”
Too inexperienced sounded like “I just graduated from law school, and I’ll give you a super good rate for the experience of working on your case.”
Just right sounded like “I know the district attorney who is overseeing your case. Their name is $NAME, and here’s exactly how I’m going to handle your case… <time passes> …I might be able to handle this for $500, but it could cost maybe double that if it’s more work than expected.”
I got the matter resolved for between 1X and 2X the minimum estimate, and was happy with the results.
Both of the times my wife and I have consulted an attorney, they provided an overview of the relevant legal and practical context, a description of options of how to approach it and what they could do as part of that and the fee structure involved, and a description of why hiring them would probably not be cost-effective for the issue at hand.
There are scrupulous and unscrupulous lawyers, much as in any profession.
There are situations where this is very good legal advice. Collecting things you are owed from people who don't want to give them up takes time and money (and involves risk), and even when it nominally works the systems intended to make you whole for the additional costs don't always, and especially often don't value time (both delay and the consumption of your personal time) as much as you do.
A lawyer's job isn't just to advise you on what the law says you are entitled to, but more critically to do so on the course of action that will best achieve your interests given the pragmatics of the legal system.
Have a home issue where the builder owes me $100k in an open-and-shut case… but there are a dozen other people in the same situation, his company has folded and he’s under indictment for fraud in an unrelated case. My lawyer advised me to just move on with my life as any chance of collecting is near-zero.
One lawyer I hired to defend me in a contractual pay dispute said to me on the first meeting with both sides "Do not let this get to court. If this goes to court the only people that will win are me and the other lawyer. We'll both get to take an extra vacation this year." So, 1% of lawyers are not scum.
Luckily it didn't need to go to court. I walked into the meeting, let the other side play hardball, "We're not going to pay you any of the money we owe you, go fuck yourself." and then showed them in the contract they had signed where it says they don't own any of the copyright to any of the work I developed for them. They left the room and came back several minutes later with a cheque.
This is also the experience of a few friends I consult each time I weight "do I need a lawyer". So my experience is 100% the opposite of yours.
How many times have you used a lawyer for something and had your example happen? How many times have they not done what you claim? Care to share examples?
As another anecdote, my experience with developers is that developers will repeatedly tell you that the software isn't complete and requires extra attention to keep it running and to maintain it, and that it needs extra time for refactoring, despite it functioning correctly right now...
Is that not true in most cases? A running system will eventually become vulnerable to attacks, and/or services it relies on may be deprecated. The last thing you want is to be in a situation where your software is easily exploitable, but your dependencies are so far behind that a fix becomes a multi-month or year long project.
