Quality is very, very difficult to measure in this context. It's a bit like measuring the quality of a doctor or other professional whose advice you need to trust beyond a shadow of a doubt.
In the end, law firms tend to trade on longstanding reputation, which is a fine, but imperfect, way of handling this problem. These days, there is no reason to assume that high rates == quality, or vice versa.
The market will sort this out eventually: right now clients are making pricing demands on big law firms that are cutting their margins significantly. As a result, firms are ditching costs in a kind of emergency sale. My own opinion is that many firms are gutting their best assets (their new, young lawyers) in order to preserve the partner profits, and that will be their downfall. Meanwhile, the next generation of lawyers will be free to charge much less, and will actually make more money.
In re bloat - if our unit testing took 15 years and millions of dollars and could even end up involving the Supreme Court, I think any of us would tend towards bloat just to be on the safe side.
Code and the law kind of do the same thing (which is why we use the same word for it) but the platforms are vastly different.
Hmmm, I usually argue this the other way around: if you could be sued for bugs in your software, many software products would probably be better designed, better tested and more usable.
You're right - but the point still remains, they can't find anyone of insert heuristic for quality for the same price. Completely agree that this is all just the market working itself out.
In the end, law firms tend to trade on longstanding reputation, which is a fine, but imperfect, way of handling this problem. These days, there is no reason to assume that high rates == quality, or vice versa.
The market will sort this out eventually: right now clients are making pricing demands on big law firms that are cutting their margins significantly. As a result, firms are ditching costs in a kind of emergency sale. My own opinion is that many firms are gutting their best assets (their new, young lawyers) in order to preserve the partner profits, and that will be their downfall. Meanwhile, the next generation of lawyers will be free to charge much less, and will actually make more money.