Earlier this week, we ran a symposium featuring prominent legal experts discussing what could be done to fix law schools. The symposium attracted numerous responses, including this one, from the University of New Hampshire's Leah Plunkett.

Law schools teach their students how to analyze both sides of every issue. So here’s the other side of the “too many lawyers, too few clients” problem that we’re hearing so much about: There are also too few lawyers and too many clients. How can both problems exist at the same time? It all comes into focus when you begin to consider things from the clients’ perspective rather than the lawyers’ point of view, and when you recognize that different groups of clients are in very different situations.

There doesn’t seem to be any doubt that there are too many lawyers available these days to serve elite clients: big businesses, wealthy non-profit institutions, high net-worth individuals, and the like. But for everybody else, lawyers are often in short supply. Paying a lawyer several hundred dollars an hour for advice or representation is a luxury beyond the means of many—if not most—Americans. Legal aid organizations do valiant work on behalf of poor clients in civil matters—like divorce, eviction, and bankruptcy cases—with little or no cost to their clients. In recent years, however, these organizations have seen their funding slashed, even as the recession and its aftermath have transformed more and more formerly middle-class Americans into potential legal aid clients. When people can’t get lawyers to help them with complex problems, they stand to lose (pdf) the things that are most precious to them, like custody of their children, the roof over their heads, or that quintessentially American opportunity to make a fresh start after crashing and burning.

Noam Scheiber on The Last Days of Big Law

Even if all Americans could afford to pay for lawyers, there may well not be any lawyers around. Outside of cities, lawyers can be scarce. As The New York Times recently reported, South Dakota has gone so far as to pass a law that will pay lawyers to work in that state’s rural communities. A worthy endeavor, but it’s difficult to imagine that the program will do much to get the over-supply of lawyers on Wall Street to migrate to Main Street: The annual stipend for South Dakota’s program is less than a month’s salary for a first-year Big Law associate in New York. And of course, as others have discussed, today’s young lawyers—who might otherwise be intrigued by doing Little Law on the Prairie—frequently face financial debt that is insurmountable on all but a Big Law salary.