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DanArmak comments on Open Thread: November 2009 - Less Wrong
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I would contribute nothing to the pool, hire a lawyer privately on the side to advise me, and pass his orders down to the public courtroom lawyer. If I have much more money than the other party, and if the money can strongly enough determine the lawyer's quality and the trial's outcome, then even advice and briefs prepared outside the courtroom by my private lawyer would be worth it.
Then your lawyer gets arrested.
It sometimes is possible to have laws or guild rules if the prohibited behavior is clear enough that people can't easily fool themselves into thinking they're not violating them. Accepting advice and briefs prepared outside the courtroom is illegal, in this world.
I agree with Alicorn. Even if you pass the law, there's no practical way to stop people from getting private advice secretly, especially in advance of the court date. If you try real hard, private lawyers will go underground (and as the saying goes, only criminals will have lawyers :-) People will pass along illegal samizdat manuals of how to behave in court, half of them actually presenting harmful advice and none of them properly attributed. Congratulations: you have just forced lawyering to become a secret Dark Art.
And this is not an improvement over the current status quo because...?
Do you think this is an improvement? As described, it looks like it's a repeat of a similar system with similar problems. (And how much of that is because we already know those failings and are best at describing them?)
How would you have legal advice outside of a court case (to ensure predictability) handled?
You seem to be engaging in motivated skepticism.
Consider how much easier it becomes to get a good professional support for the poor side in Eliezer's setup. There is just too much trouble with "underground" professional representation. A significant portion of expensive lawyers may simply not like the idea of going "underground", because it hurts their self-image and lowers their status within the community of "white-book" lawyers.
Respect trivial inconveniences.
You're right, I was deliberately playing devil's advocate. I should reconsider how likely the failure mode I described is, although I do believe its probability isn't very small.
Any other advice? What if I want to go to my Ethical Culture Society leader to ask him or her about whether something my in-court lawyer suggests would be right? What if my spouse is a lawyer? What if I'm a lawyer - a really expensive one?
Okay, suppose a lawyer is not allowed to accept briefs. In the Least Convenient case where you happen to be a really expensive lawyer, how much can actually be accomplished courtroom-wise if you talk for a few hours with a much less expensive lawyer? Would any lawyers care to weigh in?
I'm tempted to suggest 'about the same amount a professional dancer can teach an amateur, and for similar reasons'.
Why would you need to do anything with the inexpensive lawyer? Contribute nothing to the fund - maybe even forfeit your half of whatever the other party contributes - and then represent yourself.
I suspect that the only real solution to the Lawyer Problem is to remove the necessity of the profession -- ie, either simplify the law, or cognitively enhance the people to the point where any person who can not hold the whole of the law in his/her head can be declared legally incompetent.
If possible, that would certainly be a great solution.
The original (our-world) Lawyer Problem goes beyond what we've discussed here: it involves (ex-) lawyers both deliberately making the law and the case law more and more complex, to increase the value of their services.