It is vital to understand that lawyers contribute every single day not only to making businesses sustainable, but to helping them flourish. By completing business and contractual obligations and commercial transactions, resolving disputes, facilitating the flow of funds and investments, encouraging innovation through the protection of intellectual property rights, and advising entrepreneurs on viable business solutions, lawyers are able to positively impact the growth of the economy. In a developing economy with competitive businesses, lawyers also help their clients to address and even avoid pockets of market concentration through competition-law enforcement.
What is the essence of being a lawyer? What is it that lawyers do? My answer is that they create, find, interpret, adapt, apply, and enforce rules and principles that structure human relationships and interactions. More briefly, lawyers "handle" the rules and norms that define rights and duties among people and organizations. That is, they are specialists in normative ordering. The knot that properly ties together the myriad activities of so many practicing lawyers is that they are often engaged in handling rules, norms, and principles that define the rights and duties that people and organizations have with and toward each other.
Various lines of thought suggest that the growth in the legal profession is something to wring our hands about, and that if we only had a little backbone we would take steps to reverse the trend. There are as many variations on this theme as there are $#@!tail parties and barrooms, but I will limit myself to discussing three of the more serious theories. These theories allege and stress, respectively: widespread decline in the moral fabric of society; the capacity of lawyers to induce demand for their own services; and imperfections in the market for legal services.
https://www.edge.ai/2018/11/the-role...ing-economies/
Robert C. Clark, Why So Many Lawyers? Are They Good or Bad?, 61 Fordham L. Rev. 275 (1992).
Available at: http://ir.lawnet.fordham.edu/flr/vol61/iss2/1 https://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/h...pdf;sequence=1