I wonder when the Institute for Justice will go after one of the biggest guilds of them all: lawyers.

I would love to see a McKinsey or some think tank devise a legal system much simplified, and in which clerks trained in certain cores could execute the bulk of.

Really, law should be a pink-collar ghetto, paying about $25 an hour.

And the lawyers at Institute of Justice? What do they say about that?

I like how the IRS has acknowledged here that "regular people" aren't qualified to file income taxes, yet we can still be prosecuted and imprisoned for failing to do so or for doing it wrong.

I can tell you for a fact I have called the IRS three times asking the same question...and gotten three different answers.

They have no clue what they're doing, so I don't see how they can say anyone else can do any beter.

Hahaha! A qualifying exam! How will anyone at the IRS know whether a person taking the exam gave the right answers?

"The problem of "poorly done" returns perhaps links back to how utterly disgustingly complicated our tax code is."

Yes, this is exactly right. I have always done my own taxes and wondered how other folks have faired. Especially when I worked in NY; but lived in NJ; filing Fed, NY state, NY city (when they had out-of-state-workers pay local tax) and NJ was all very mind-blowingly complex. I couldn't help but think as I struggled with all the forms, "I am not a stupid person, am college-educated, how the hell does someone with a lesser education do this?"

The legal profession is increasingly a pink collar ghetto. The US would do well to turn law school into an undergraduate degree, as it is elsewhere in the world, and design the education to train people to perform the basics of the trade.

For most attorneys, specialization happens on the job or can be gained in what is known as an LLM. The three years of law school on top of 4 years of undergraduate education, and then a bar exam, and yearly CLE requirements... irrelevant and insanely expensive.

Lawyers better than anyone know that this is a huge racket.

I say this as a 2008 graduate of a US law school who has trained and worked with attorneys from around the world.

> a pink collar ghetto

Fun new descriptor!

I wonder what they would say about preparers using TurboTax?

Would they be messily prepared still?

See "Pink Collar Workers," by Louise Kapp Howe, published in 1977.

Law firms used to hire newly minted attorneys to perform document review, and then train them up the ladder (or not).

This task is now farmed out to contractors at a much lower hourly rate, with no benefits. A long overdue market correction. Most discovery work is handled by computers, and one small study explores whether high schools students can handle the remaining review analysis at least as well as attorneys. Certainly 7 years of post-high school education is overkill.

http://e-discoveryteam.com/2012/09/16/analysis-of-the-official-report-on-the-2011-trec-legal-track-part-two/

So, these document review gigs are now dead end jobs in a profession increasingly dominated by women.

I do think that there are lawyering skills that require intelligence, thoughtfulness, and study to develop - however seven years in a classroom is not the best use of the time or money.