It's not that lawyers are overpaid, it's just that they don't compete with the world for prices and they all agree on certain prices in their own market. You can't outsource a lawyer to India because he most likely doesn't know US law. Also we programmer have this extraordinarily poor ability to SELL ourselves. We should try to factor in the time we bill the time it took us to get to that kind of knowledge we have, like pharma companies factor in the cost of research and then sell a single blue pill at 20US a pop!

There's no reason a lawyer in India couldn't learn US law. He probably wouldn't even start very far behind US citizen. The real problem is that he can't set foot in a US courtroom without a visa.

There's an amount of legal work currently outsourced to India - things that can be legally outsourced, that is. Currently, the class of things that can be legally outsourced is small (research + writing + document review.)

random google survey:

http://www.pangea3.com/ http://sqglobalsolutions.com/ http://www.sunlexis.com/ http://legal-process-outsourcing.com/ http://www.legaleasesolutions.com/

Here's a list last updated in 2008: http://www.prismlegal.com/index.php?option=content&task=...

To me, this is indication that there's a flood being held back by legislation.

Where I am lawyers have to do two years of supervised training in an existing law firm on top of a degree and a postgraduate qualification.

You might be able to do that remotely - but it would be pretty difficult to do some things (e.g. how do you attend court?).

Yeah right, even a German lawyer could learn US law, except he wouldn't even be able to call himself a lawyer in US, cause even without the visa he couldn't practice the profession.

No, the main problem is that he needs a license to practise US law. The most you can get him to do is review or draft documents.

right. Software engineering is a global thing.

China is not on the right track, that's for sure.

I'm a Chinese student. Believe me, I abandoned Chinese food for Carl's Jr for good reasons. China is not on a right track.

China was an inferior student of the class, he used to get F for his final exams, but now he has improved to C or may be B, Admittedly he has been improving really fast, but this is because he was so bad that he had a large room to improve. How hard to improve from A to A+?

You mentioned that Chinese leaders are engineers, that's true. But I can tell you why, because 25 years ago, there was no such thing called "finance" in China. Did they have it in the Soviet Union? North Korea? Cuba? Also, in a country without a real legal system, why would people want to be a lawyer?

Those Chinese leaders became leaders, not because they are excellent engineers, but because they have connections. In fact, I seriously doubt how they got their engineering degrees.

I agree with you that engineers should play more role in politics and government. I'm willing to see more presidents with engineering backgrounds.

Well, but the Chinese society does encourage young people to pursue an engineering degree.

In China, people have the impression that engineering students are the smartest, whereas in the U.S. people think smartest student go to law school.