Life Without Lawyers

15 responses to “Life Without Lawyers”

1. 

   Automatt

   Feb 23, 2010 at 4:33 am

   How unusual that the TED crowd would be into tort reform.

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2. 

   Todd Huffman

   Feb 23, 2010 at 4:34 am

   I may have a naive view of the situation, but I feel the problem is lawyers beget more lawyers. An underemployed lawyer can create business, and so the market size for law is driven by the suppliers.

   At one point I worked for a small company who’s major objective was R&D. I found out more money was spent on the legal budget than actual R&D. The management didn’t have the foresight/will to cut the legal budget, and I quit.

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3. 

   jurvetson

   Feb 23, 2010 at 5:04 am

   Same is true for IBM and nanotech. More lawyers than engineers.

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4. 

   In Memoriam: jerryfi_99

   Feb 23, 2010 at 5:46 am

   If we banned lawyers from entering congress, and the WH, we would be miles ahead of the game. Alas, Howard’s sentiments don’t stand a chance with the current regime. The 2K+ pages of "Healthcare" legislation (laws, taxes and penalties!!!) don’t do a thing about tort reform. I’d vote for, and contribute to, Howard, but then I’ve been called Don Quixote before….. hmmm, many more windmills to tilt at today….

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5. 

   amitp

   Feb 23, 2010 at 6:32 am

   A great talk. I don’t see how to make it work though. To get rid of lawyers you’ll need approval from lawyers, and that seems unlikely 😉

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6. 

   In Memoriam: jerryfi_99

   Feb 23, 2010 at 7:04 am

   Age old problem. The butcher in Shakespeare’s King Henry VI even sensed the problem.;-)

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7. 

   Dr DAD (Daniel A D’Auria MD)

   Feb 23, 2010 at 10:03 am

   I’m currently the brunt of a malpractice suit after 20 malpractice free years. The patient refused care after it was strongly suggested she be transferred to a tertiary care hospital. She ultimately died months later in an unrelated incident, and now I and many others are being dragged through the mud. I can tell you without doubt that it changes the way you practice medicine. I definitely order and perform more tests now than I did before. And I wait to see just how high this will push my malpractice premiums. It is likely to cost me more over the rest of my career than my children’s college educations.

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8. 

   merv72573

   Feb 23, 2010 at 11:21 am

   lawyer bashing. how creative.

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9. 

   sbove

   Feb 23, 2010 at 4:02 pm

   "Lawyers are like nuclear weapons. My enemy has ’em, so I got a have ’em, and once someone uses ’em they F everything up."

   – Danny DeVito’s character in Ruthless People.

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10. 

    Jonathan Ruff

    Feb 24, 2010 at 2:41 am

    Bold TED talk. It’s amazing how controversial some simple things have become in our litigious society.

    Until recently, America was pyramid’ing itself upward toward higher skilled, higher standard of living / better paying jobs. But we’ve regulated, choked, and lawyered everything so tightly we can’t hardly move in any direction toward the next level up on the technology pyramid. China came in under us, replacing our industrial & manufacturing jobs as we moved on to higher tech fields (biotech, semiconductors, software, aerospace, advanced materials, Internet, etc etc). Naturally China & India are coming after the next level of technology up the pyramid, and they’re doing it at lightning speed relatively speaking (benefiting from our own tech, and benefiting from their societal speed yearning for advancement); while we’re crawling at a snail’s pace in many critical fields.

    Only once in the prior five or six decades has America truly been challenged economically (by Japan), and that was realistically a narrow challenge (Japan is excellent at a select field economically, and limited in various ways due to geography, demographics and natural resources, etc).

    But how many people think we have the flexibility legally to leap forward technologically again to stay out in front of China. To build radically faster mass transportation; to build nuclear technology (Bill Gates @ TED); to deploy massive solar & wind farms, in reasonable time at reasonable cost; to build silicon, in Silicon Valley again (tip TJ Rodgers); to deploy far more advanced transmission lines to facilitate the energy for electric cars; to advance space tech; to dominate the next wave of self regenerative medicine; to take advantage of the human genome without religious zealots blocking it; and on and on. It’s all a legal nightmare.

    I’m hoping once again that the US will respond to competitive challenges from other countries, and that that will bring out the best, cutting a path to the next societal advancements. We’ll have to get pretty desperate and hungry no doubt, to do it.

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11. 

    RalfLippold

    Feb 24, 2010 at 12:51 pm

    Lawyers hinder innovation – they stick to the rules that are put on paper. Innovation happens in people’s minds

    Let the people fly to their dreams 😉

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12. 

    benjiman

    Feb 25, 2010 at 12:33 am

    Howard is spot on.

    In short: lawyers have cut the balls off America.

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13. 

    goodeye03 (Rich)

    Feb 25, 2010 at 3:39 am

    They even took the Fun out of my Yacht Club…….

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14. 

    bigred93

    Feb 27, 2010 at 9:45 pm

    Lawyers do a good job of managing and mitigating risk, but the problem is that they get paid for their time whether the risk they address is big or small. This is a classic case of misaligned incentives. As long as this is the case, we will continue to have lawyers writing NDAs that are longer than the Constitution.

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15. 

    silbabrennon

    Nov 10, 2014 at 3:47 pm

    It’s such an interesting talk. I now understand all of the fine print on pretty much everything. Many people make mountains out of mole hills.
    http://www.emeryjamieson.com

    Reply