Do all laws increase lawyer revenue?

[wellwisher]

The question I would like to pose is, does adding more laws increase the demand for legal goods and services? If this is the case, could the desire for more revenue by some lawyers, lead to more laws so they can increase the demand for their goods and services?

For example, say I created a new law which says that nobody can wear black shoes or will have to pay a fine. Will this increase the demand for legal good and services? The answer is yes.

When I created that hypothetical black shoe law, what I also did was define a new class of criminals, that did not exist before the law. This would be a victimless crime, unless we can subjectiively get people to whine about the impact of black shoes. Then we woild have a new crime, new criminal/victims and higher demand for lawyers.

I am not against all lawyers, since black shoe types laws, might not be something the average person can defend against. They may need to a good lawyer to help take the insanity out of the situation. But still, if the less than honest lawyers, wanted to expand business even firther, if they fought this seam, would blue shoes laws help revenue flow too?

Where I am going with this is the potential for conflict of interest. We need lawyers to make laws due to the intricacy. Yet how do you avoid putting the fox in charge of the chickens, so the final output of law is not partially designed with increasing the demands for legal goods and service in mind?

[Asguard]

Depends, there are a lot of different types of laws. Expenditure Bills for instance generally don't get challanged so the demand would be low, administrative laws would also be rarly challenged. Criminal law on the other hand probably would increase workload

[Regular0ldguy]

Interesting point. It is absolutely true that the more prosecutions there are, the more need there will be for prosecutors and defense lawyers. Same thing in regulations. You need people to understand them (which usually requires legal research to figure out all of the case law that has been decided relating to how the specific phrases in law have been interpreted and enforced in the past for similar laws and phrases so the lawyers can make intelligent guesses as to how courts will apply the rules so they can advise their clients on their chances). Then you need the lawyers to interface with the regulators to monitor what the enforcement intentions are (because there is prosecutorial discretion in who they are going to go after and how they are going to interpret this particular rule). And because this is all such a pain in the ass, and hard to follow, you need to keep lawyers around so you can call them as compliance and planning actions are being taken, not to mention getting out of trouble when you guess wrong. And that's just how the big companies do it., the little guy usually doesn't even hear about the law or regulation until it is too late, or unless he pays to go to seminars and such to get legal updates.

OTOH, I know a lot of lawyers and politicians, and the hoops they are trying to jump through to pass laws are really directed at making something concrete happen (however short sited it might be and however poorly they have taken into account unintended consequences) and the emphasis is never to employ other lawyers of different specialties. However, as particularly complex and burdensome laws and procedures have been instituted in the past, I know lawyers have evaluated what effect it will have on their future business. That's just business.

So I don't really see a true conflict. The real conflict is having bureaucrats create regulations and procedures which they will be enforcing (whether they are lawyers or not) as that is what causes the growth. It is politically correct to say that all the bureaucrats are well meaning and their rules well intentioned, but I don't buy it. They are thinking about creating the need for their department to expand, get a bigger budget, become more important, and get them advancement to a management position over all the new people, meaning a raise and lots of people to fire before they have to go in hard times. Nest feathering.