HN, help me make up my mind: is an abundance of lawyers to be seen as a necessary component of a complex society? Or is it a symptom of decay? Are lawyers necessary agents of the greater good or are they vampiric rent-seekers on a byzantine legal morass?
I'm not trying to be clever; I genuinely want to figure this out.
In England people are encouraged not to go to law until they really need to.
People with family law problems (divorce, access to children, etc) are encouraged, strongly, to use mediation before they go to court. This mediation can be lawyer led, but it can also be led by other professionals.
People with employment problems usually need to filter through any internal company policies before they go to law.
Rejecting pre-trial discussions is usually a bad idea.
Solicitors will tell you that going to law is a bad idea, and expensive, and will often not get the result you want. I think, BICBW, that they need to do this as part of their professional codes of conduct. They're tightly regulated, and encouraging people to go to law if they're unlikely to win is frowned upon.
Note that none of this is a barrier to effective law; once you need to go to law you've usually had several discussions with solicitors and you know what's involved and what to expect from your barrister.
There are separate tracks for quick and easy civil "small claims" cases, but even these can sometimes be avoided by using existing legal protections. (The very consumer-friendly "Distance Buying Regulations" or the credit card protections, for example.)
Here's another reply which tries to better answer your question:
I live in England. We have free health care available to all. But if you want to pay you can buy private medical insurance.
I was debating with some friends. They said that it was wrong for doctors who got free training in the NHS to then go and work privately; they said that doctors should work for X years in the NHS.
I said that doctors didn't get free training; they have large student debts and they work for years in tough conditions for low pay. And then I asked what the difference between doctors (educated and trained at UK tax-payer expense) and lawyers (educated at UK tax-payer expense)? Why is it wrong for doctors to work privately, and not for lawyers? Why are legal-aid lawyers so hard to find in the UK? Why is "pro-bono" so rare?
Some lawyers can be drivers of social change for good (fair pay, anti-racism, etc) but they often get hoovered into creating laws or finding loopholes for weird corporate behaviours.
I'm not trying to be clever; I genuinely want to figure this out.