There is an excess of lawyers in certain areas; an excess of IP lawyers doesn't map to an excess of divorce attorneys.

>if you're a lawyer, do you charge the amount that covers your loans, or the amount that nets you the most profit?

If all lawyers were interchangeable, your argument might hold, but the artificially high price of legal education leads to a misallocation of resources--The increased cost of student loans can cause lawyers to move into specialities that are higher paying, causing shortages in one area and surpluses in others.

> The increased cost of student loans can cause lawyers to move into specialities that are higher paying, causing shortages in one area and surpluses in others.

This is circular. You're arguing that shortages in some areas are causing higher prices, but then arguing that lawyers are leaving certain areas for the areas that pay higher salaries. You can't say that prices are high for corporate legal services because supply is restricted while saying that the high cost of legal education causes a surplus of lawyers in areas where salaries (i.e. prices) are the highest.

You can't make sense of the legal market by thinking of it in terms of regulation cutting off supply leading to higher prices. That is not the major operative force in the legal field.

The major operative force is branding, and that drives everything else. Companies pay substantial fees to hire firms with brands. Firms with brands pay substantial salaries to hire attorneys with brands.

There are 200+ ABA-accredited law schools, with 45,000 graduates each year. Only about 10-15% get a job working with a big firm that does corporate work. This is because at a big New York firm, fully a quarter of the new hires might come from Harvard and Yale, and 90% from the top 15 schools. Even with the high cost of legal education there is a huge untapped supply of attorneys who would jump at the chance to work for half as much as Harvard grads to do corporate work. There are no ABA restrictions to hiring these people to do corporate work. What there is is a lack of demand for lower-price lower with lesser credentials in that particular subset of the market.

>You can't say that prices are high for corporate legal services because supply is restricted

I'm not saying that. I agree with you that there is a surplus of corporate lawyers, and so deregulation wouldn't really reduce the price in that sector.

Even if there were cheap lawyers who learned through apprenticeship instead of law school, large companies still wouldn't hire them.

I'm talking about prices being driven up in other areas, where law school grads with insane debt don't want to work.

I know several law school grads who couldn't find the kind of high paying job they were looking for. However, since they had so much debt they ended up taking non legal jobs (one is a project manager, the other an entrepreneur), instead of moving into another lower paid area of the law.

Because of high education costs (and the requirement that lawyers posses a graduate degree, which means most of them are going to be at least 25 by the time they can start practicing, plus the psychological factors involved in having spent 7 years in school), there is a minimum price below which most lawyers will not work, and will seek other opportunities.