Before we talk too much about why lawyers are so expensive, it's worth checking out how much they actually get paid. It's the weirdest salary chart you'll ever see:

http://www.nalp.org/salarydistrib

Basically it's the sum of two separate curves -- a bell curve centered around $45,000 a year, and a sharp, sharp peak up at $160,000.

What's going on here? Well law is two separate markets -- the bell curve is the 90% of lawyers who compete on cost in a more or less normal market, and the sharp peak is the 10% of lawyers who work at BigLaw firms that march in lockstep at $160,000 for new associates.

So for the 90%, the answer is that law is a highly competitive market. You're paying $150,000 in tuition to get a job that averages $45k a year when you start, and won't go up too fast. You're doing largely hard, boring work, it sucks to do without support staff, and it's time-consuming to do right. If the product costs a lot, it's not because the lawyer is overpaid -- it's because that's how much it costs to produce. Lawyers who drop below that price go out of business.

For the 10%, they're in a weird parallel universe where the cost of their service is almost totally irrelevant to their clients. They're handling international mergers, billion-dollar divorces, and Federal indictments of entire financial firms. The question of whether the lawyers charge $300 or $600/hr is like the question of whether your parachute costs $50 or $100 before you jump out of a plane. If there's the slightest chance that the $100 parachute is safer, you go for it. That's why the starting salaries march in lockstep -- no BigLaw firm can afford to let people think that the cream of the crop from Harvard Law is being hired by their competitors. They'd lose all their business if anyone else had a clear edge. But this only relates to a small minority of lawyers.

...

To disclose my own bias, this article/conversation is strange to me because I took a big pay cut to go from programming (which I could do before I graduated from college) to law (where most of my lower salary goes to student loans). I knew I would. I didn't join the BigLaw 10% (which I would have hated), but I'm getting to work on things that matter to me, and I'm proud I made that call. But to see a bunch of programmers talk about why lawyers have it so good ... yeesh.

This isn't to say that law can't get easier or cheaper. There are huge wins to be had from automation here, and I always turn into the resident tools guy wherever I work. I've had to get pretty good at VBA of all things, and 1000 curses on that misbegotten tongue. (Jashkenas, are you listening? Need a project after CoffeeScript?) I also think law school needs to get a lot cheaper -- like college tuition in general, it's been growing at twice inflation for decades, and that can't be right.

One other thought -- the bar is indeed a protected guild, and I'm not sure where I stand on that, but there are reasons for it. First and foremost, you will never know whether your lawyer has done a good job. If you hire a programmer, there may be problems behind the scenes, but you can more or less tell whether they've done what you hired them to do. If you hire a lawyer, and you lose your case, you will often have not the slightest idea whether they were competent -- there's just not enough signal for most laypeople to analyze in most cases. Even my own supervisors often have no idea whether I've done my job right. They ask me a question, I answer it, and without repeating the work I did they have no way of telling whether I'm right or how long it should have taken to complete.

Requiring education, examination and licensing is one way to address that problem. It definitely raises the price. In theory it also lowers the chances that you're buying snake oil. Something to consider anyway.