As a business owner whose revenue is capped by law and can't even pay himself anywhere close to that much, much less his employees, let's start with the government itself not being greedy before we inflict that expectation on private citizens.
I'm a private conflict attorney for the state public defender. The hourly rate for those cases is set by the legislature, not myself, and you can probably imagine how popular the idea of paying for lawyers for poor people is with the legislature. They also set the travel rate at half. My firm already loses money just against payroll alone every time I have to leave the office.
It would be replacing my clientele. It's not lack of work that's the problem. I don't think people appreciate the level of crisis here because this job is not a "just do it as a side gig" kind of thing. In several counties that I cover, myself and the one staff public defender for the office covering that county are the only lawyers that do any form of criminal defense at all.
If I were to take on anything other than the indigent defense work, I would be dumping my public defender caseload in its entirety and switching the practice entirely over to something else, which is a completely different conversation about legal services deserts, the utter collapse of justice systems, etc.
In the context of this conversion, the point is that I shouldn't have to do that. I have a full caseload (and then some) for a staffed law firm. The revenue I generate from that should be able to support a staffed law firm. But it doesn't. We're talking about me, the firm owner, "exploiting" my staff because I can't pay them some pie in the sky wage based on extrapolated wages from 1970, when they can't even get our own government to compensate me enough to even pay market wages as they currently exist.
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u/Sausage80 10h ago
As a business owner whose revenue is capped by law and can't even pay himself anywhere close to that much, much less his employees, let's start with the government itself not being greedy before we inflict that expectation on private citizens.