"In [New Zealand], much of the mess we are in can be blamed, in my view, on lawyers (and judges). ...
"It was Geoffrey Palmer, a lawyer, who designed the original Resource Management Act, and it is David Parker, a lawyer, who's currently drawing up plans to implement wealth and capital taxes as part of the Labour Party's platform for the 2026 election. The current Chair of Kiwi Rail is a lawyer. His Deputy Chair is a lawyer. Most of NZ's big firms have boards dominated by lawyers (and accountants) who have no shop-floor experience in the industry in which "their" company is working. How have they got their jobs? From what I have learned, mostly by networking & schmoozing. Is this a world-wide phenomena? No. Who do companies like Tesla have on their boards? To give you a flavor, folks like Mr. Gebbia, co-founder of Airbnb, and Mr. Straubel, founder of Redwood Materials, a firm working to drive down the costs and environmental footprint of lithium-ion batteries by offering sources of anode & cathode materials from recycled batteries. ...
"What has been the objective of those sitting in the Auckland law firms quietly earning incomes of way over $1 million a year? To maximise their fee income, of course. The legal & regulatory structures that have promoted monopoly power in NZ, the frameworks that govern race-relations, and the mountains of red-tape we all must navigate, have been made deliberately divisive, deliberately ineffective, and deliberately onerous by Kiwi lawyers, all to generate more disputes & work for law firms and their partners. The profession that has ground NZ's economy to a halt has been our legal profession — all in the name of its ... quest for higher incomes."~ Robert MacCulloch from his post 'God Save New Zealand from Lawyers'
Tuesday 23 July 2024
"Much of the mess we are in can be blamed, in my view, on lawyers ... "
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4 comments:
I don’t believe it can be blamed on lawyers per se, nor on their self interested motives in maximising their income. Everyone is (or should be) motivated by self interest. The problem lies in elevating lawyers to positions of responsibility beyond their level of competence.
Lawyers like most professions see the world a certain way. Their knee jerk reaction to any risk is to try writing a rule or contract condition that discourages risky behaviour. That’s a good approach in certain contexts, but it’s destructive for a business generally. All opportunity comes with some risk, and too many rules takes away the flexibility to respond to changing circumstances.
If you put a fox in charge of the hen house and the inevitable carnage follows, you don’t blame the nature of the fox. You blame whoever thought putting them in charge was a good idea.
@Mark T: But it's the lawyers who finagled themselves to *be* in charge. To re-quote one of my favourite observations of HL Mencken:
"Dr. Davis [Democratic presidential candidate nominated as a compromise on 103rd ballot] is said to be a good [lawyer]. But is there any reason to believe that, among lawyers, the best are much better than the worst? I can find none. All the extravagance and incompetence of our present Government is due, in the main, to lawyers, and, in part at least, to good ones. They are responsible for nine-tenths of the useless and vicious laws that now clutter the statute-books, and for all the evils that go with the vain attempts to enforce them. Every Federal judge is a lawyer. So are most Congressmen. Every invasion of the plain rights of the citizen has a lawyer behind it. If all lawyers were hanged tomorrow, and their bones sold to a mah jong factory, we’d all be freer and safer, and our taxes would be reduced by almost half."
My point still applies. You’re protesting the nature of the fox. Better off to just appreciate the nature of the fox, and that at times it has benefit (eg: to eat vermin), but keep it caged when it might instead eat your hens.
Here’s a small example of what ‘keeping them caged’ looks like. I recently had to put together a construction contract for the civil works of a subdivision for my client, and I based it on an NZS3915 format I’d used successfully in the past and adapted over time from lessons learnt. For some reason this time, probably pressure from the Board, he requested a ‘legal review’ before it went out for tender in a tight programme. Unsurprisingly the lawyer proceeded to completely rewrite it, perhaps for the better in some respects, but in many other respects either indecipherable or counter to my intentions in clearly ascribing risks to either party. Most contractual disputes come when risk is not clear, or contract conditions aren’t simple and understandable. The lawyer invited me to come back with comment, but implied it was his job to finalise the document based on my feedback, rather than the other way round. I knew from past experience this would result in a painful back and forth, which we didn’t have time for, and on some points I’d eventually be worn down. The old me would have either complied or thrown my toys out of the cot. This time however I phoned my client and advised him my views on his changes, and that if he wanted me to run the contract, that him and I would need to go through the suggested changes and agree point by point to either accept or reject them, without further legal input. We proceeded to do that, I thanked the lawyer for his suggestions, and advised him we had it from here.
So yes, lawyers will attempt to elevate themselves to positions of authority. Doesn’t mean we need to let them.
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