I think many people should be less afraid of lawsuits, though I’m not sure I’d say “almost everyone.”
I wouldn’t draw much from the infrequency of lawsuits being filed. Many disputes are resolved in the shadow of the legal system, without an actual court being involved. For example, I read a number of cases in law school where one person sued another after a car accident. Yet when I actually got into a car accident myself, no lawsuit was ever filed. I talked to my insurance company, the other driver presumably talked to their insurance company, the two companies talked to each other, money flowed around, things were paid for. Much more efficient than bringing everybody into a courtroom, empaneling a jury, and paying lawyers in fancy suits to make arguments. The insurance companies knew what the law was, knew who would have to pay money to who, and so they were able to skip over the whole courtroom battle step, and go directly to the payment step. This is what usually happens when an area of law is mature—the potential parties, sometimes with good advice from their attorneys, reach similar conclusions about the likely outcome of a potential lawsuit, and this allows them to reach an agreement outside of court. Lawsuits are much more likely to happen when the law is more ambiguous, and therefor the parties can have significantly different estimations of the outcome of the suit. So the frequency of lawsuits is often a measure of how much disagreement there is about an area of law. Other times it reflects a requirement to actually go to court to do something (like debt collection or mortgage foreclosure). But I don’t think it is a good measure of the likelihood of having to pay out money for some arguable violation of the law.
Also, many contracts contain arbitration clauses, which also prevent conflicts from making it into a courtroom.
The notion of lawyers being overly conservative I think is also an incomplete description of that dynamic. A good lawyer will tell you how much you can expect a potential lawsuit to cost, and therefor whether it is more or less than the expected benefit of the action. If your lawyer won’t do this, you should fire them and hire someone else. As an illustration, think about universities violating the free speech and due process rights of their students, and getting sued for it. They do this because the cost of not doing it (in public relations, angry students/faculty/donors, Title IX lawsuits) is more than the cost of a potential constitutional lawsuit, and they know it. How do they know it? Because their lawyers told them so.
I think sometimes people don’t want to take the advice of lawyers they perceive as overly conservative, even when they should. People trying to build something or make a deal will often get very excited about it, and only want to see the ways it can go well. Lawyers have seen, or at least studied, many past conflicts, and so they can often see more clearly what conflicts might arise as a result of some project, and advise clients on how to avoid them. That is often what clients pay lawyers for. But to the client, it can often feel like the lawyer putting an unnecessary damper on the shiny project they are excited about.
There is also the moral aspect. Laws often have a moral point behind them. Sometimes when people refrain from doing things to avoid being sued, they are refraining from doing immoral things. And sometimes when people disregard legal advice, do a thing, and get sued, they actually did an immoral thing. To take an example that I watched closely at the time, and that connects to one of Alyssa’s examples, during the 2014-2015 school year Rolling Stone published an article, based on a single young woman’s account, of gang rape being used as a form of fraternity initiation at UVA. Rolling Stone did not do the sort of fact checking that is standard in journalism. (If memory serves the Columbia School of Journalism put out a report detailing the failures here). Over the course of several months, the story fell apart, it turned out to be a complete fabrication. And Rolling Stone was sued, and had to pay out. I can imagine Rolling Stone’s lawyers advising them not to publish that article without doing some more fact checking, and those lawyers would have been right on the law. But more fact checking also would have been the morally correct thing to do. Even in the case of abuse/rape, defamation law does have a moral point to make—you shouldn’t make up stories about being abused/raped and present them as the truth.
Finally, as an ex-lawyer, I unreservedly endorse Alyssa’s advice not to take on six figures of debt to go to law school without researching the job market.
I think many people should be less afraid of lawsuits, though I’m not sure I’d say “almost everyone.”
I wouldn’t draw much from the infrequency of lawsuits being filed. Many disputes are resolved in the shadow of the legal system, without an actual court being involved. For example, I read a number of cases in law school where one person sued another after a car accident. Yet when I actually got into a car accident myself, no lawsuit was ever filed. I talked to my insurance company, the other driver presumably talked to their insurance company, the two companies talked to each other, money flowed around, things were paid for. Much more efficient than bringing everybody into a courtroom, empaneling a jury, and paying lawyers in fancy suits to make arguments. The insurance companies knew what the law was, knew who would have to pay money to who, and so they were able to skip over the whole courtroom battle step, and go directly to the payment step. This is what usually happens when an area of law is mature—the potential parties, sometimes with good advice from their attorneys, reach similar conclusions about the likely outcome of a potential lawsuit, and this allows them to reach an agreement outside of court. Lawsuits are much more likely to happen when the law is more ambiguous, and therefor the parties can have significantly different estimations of the outcome of the suit. So the frequency of lawsuits is often a measure of how much disagreement there is about an area of law. Other times it reflects a requirement to actually go to court to do something (like debt collection or mortgage foreclosure). But I don’t think it is a good measure of the likelihood of having to pay out money for some arguable violation of the law.
Also, many contracts contain arbitration clauses, which also prevent conflicts from making it into a courtroom.
The notion of lawyers being overly conservative I think is also an incomplete description of that dynamic. A good lawyer will tell you how much you can expect a potential lawsuit to cost, and therefor whether it is more or less than the expected benefit of the action. If your lawyer won’t do this, you should fire them and hire someone else. As an illustration, think about universities violating the free speech and due process rights of their students, and getting sued for it. They do this because the cost of not doing it (in public relations, angry students/faculty/donors, Title IX lawsuits) is more than the cost of a potential constitutional lawsuit, and they know it. How do they know it? Because their lawyers told them so.
I think sometimes people don’t want to take the advice of lawyers they perceive as overly conservative, even when they should. People trying to build something or make a deal will often get very excited about it, and only want to see the ways it can go well. Lawyers have seen, or at least studied, many past conflicts, and so they can often see more clearly what conflicts might arise as a result of some project, and advise clients on how to avoid them. That is often what clients pay lawyers for. But to the client, it can often feel like the lawyer putting an unnecessary damper on the shiny project they are excited about.
There is also the moral aspect. Laws often have a moral point behind them. Sometimes when people refrain from doing things to avoid being sued, they are refraining from doing immoral things. And sometimes when people disregard legal advice, do a thing, and get sued, they actually did an immoral thing. To take an example that I watched closely at the time, and that connects to one of Alyssa’s examples, during the 2014-2015 school year Rolling Stone published an article, based on a single young woman’s account, of gang rape being used as a form of fraternity initiation at UVA. Rolling Stone did not do the sort of fact checking that is standard in journalism. (If memory serves the Columbia School of Journalism put out a report detailing the failures here). Over the course of several months, the story fell apart, it turned out to be a complete fabrication. And Rolling Stone was sued, and had to pay out. I can imagine Rolling Stone’s lawyers advising them not to publish that article without doing some more fact checking, and those lawyers would have been right on the law. But more fact checking also would have been the morally correct thing to do. Even in the case of abuse/rape, defamation law does have a moral point to make—you shouldn’t make up stories about being abused/raped and present them as the truth.
Finally, as an ex-lawyer, I unreservedly endorse Alyssa’s advice not to take on six figures of debt to go to law school without researching the job market.