Friday, January 03, 2003

Lawyer, heal thyself

Glenn Reynolds has a long post about trial lawyers here, in the context of medical malpractice crises in PA and WV.

He says that doctors don't do a good job of policing their own. That wouldn't surprise me - this task is the province of professional associations, and these typically are more about protecting their professions against outsiders rather than vice versa. OTOH if you do try to discipline a doctor, you'd better have a heck of a case, because he'll have his own lawyer poised to take a big cut of his settlement. So it seems that lawyers are part of the problem here too.

Are lawyers somehow better at being lawyers than doctors are at being doctors? Hmm. I'd like to see relative figures for malpractice, ie, the percentages of each that are sanctioned, and how big the judgments are.

In other words, I'd like to see how good lawyers are at policing their own.

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