The Nomos Founder’s Series — Part Two
There is something strange about the way most people walk into an attorney’s office. They come carrying a peculiar combination of emotions that, as far as I can tell, exists in almost no other professional relationship. They trust you. They believe you will act in their best interest, that you are on their side, that you possess knowledge they need. And at the same time, they expect the experience to be unpleasant. They expect to be told what they can and cannot do. They expect delays, frustration, complexity, and cost. They expect, at best, a neutral experience—something to be endured rather than valued.
Think about how unusual that is. You do not walk into your doctor’s office simultaneously trusting her judgment and dreading the encounter itself. You might fear a diagnosis, but you do not expect the process of care to be the source of your discomfort. You do not hire an architect expecting him to tell you what kind of house you are permitted to build and then charge you by the hour for the privilege of finding out. Yet this is something very close to how most people experience legal counsel. Resigned faith: I believe this person is on my side, but I also believe the process will cost me more than it should, take longer than it needs to, and leave me feeling like a passenger in my own affairs.
That expectation did not come from nowhere. It was taught—slowly, structurally, over decades—by a profession that has gradually lost sight of what it is for.
In the first essay in this series, I argued that the Law exists to formalize and scale something innate in human nature: the moral intuition that we can bind ourselves to one another, that promises carry weight, that future obligations can be made real enough to build on. The farmer who signs a solar lease already understands obligation. He has been making and keeping promises his entire life. What he does not understand—what no one should be expected to understand without dedicated study—is the enormous system that has been built on top of those intuitions. Property law, tax codes, regulatory frameworks, financing structures, recording statutes. The system is genuinely complex, and that complexity is not artificial. A wind energy easement that touches federal tax incentives, state utility regulations, county zoning, and multi-jurisdictional financing really does require expertise to navigate.
The attorney’s role, then, is not to stand between the client and the Law as a gatekeeper controlling access. It is to walk alongside the client as a steward—someone who takes what the client already understands about their own intentions, obligations, and goals and translates it into a form the system can recognize and enforce. The client knows what they want. The client knows what is fair. The attorney’s job is to make that knowledge durable.
A steward does not own what they care for. A steward does not restrict access to it. A steward takes responsibility for something on someone else’s behalf, with the understanding that the thing ultimately belongs to them. That is what legal counsel looks like at its best: the attorney as a faithful translator between the client’s native understanding and the system’s formal requirements.
But that is not what most clients experience, and it is not what the profession’s current structure is designed to produce.
The legal profession, as it operates today, is organized almost entirely around crisis intervention. Clients do not come to attorneys as a matter of course, the way they might see a financial advisor annually or visit a dentist for a cleaning. They come when they have exhausted their own efforts and hit a wall that the broader legal structure has erected. I need to sell my house and the law requires an attorney to draft the deed. I need a will because I am getting older and my affairs are not in order. I need an entity formed because I have been operating without one and my accountant told me I am exposed. The engagement is reactive, discrete, and terminal. The attorney handles the matter. The client pays the bill. The relationship ends until the next crisis.
The parallel to medicine is instructive and, I think, not superficial. For most of its history, the medical profession organized itself around treating disease. You went to the doctor when something was already wrong. The entire infrastructure—hospitals, insurance models, residency training, economic incentives—optimized around acute intervention. The doctor was the person you saw when you were suffering, and the relationship was defined by that suffering. The shift toward preventative medicine did not merely change when patients saw physicians. It changed what a physician was for. It reframed the relationship from “fix what is broken” to “help me stay well.” And it required the profession to actively work against its own economic incentives, because there has always been more money in treating illness than in preventing it.
The legal profession has not undergone that shift. It remains, by and large, in its pre-preventative era. And the economics of private practice make the shift extraordinarily difficult to achieve.
Consider the structural forces at work. An attorney is inherently bound by the hours in a day. Under the billable hour model—still the dominant compensation structure in private practice—the rational economic behavior is to take on as many discrete matters as possible, invest the minimum viable time in each, and charge the highest rate the market will bear. There is no economic incentive to invest in the client relationship beyond the immediate engagement. No incentive to educate the client about how to avoid future problems. No incentive to build the kind of ongoing partnership that might prevent the next crisis—because the next crisis is the next billable engagement.
Now compound this with a supply constraint that is worsening in many parts of the country. The number of attorneys in private practice is declining, particularly in rural and mid-market areas. The attorneys who remain get busier. Their time becomes scarcer. Rates rise. The threshold for what constitutes a matter worth taking goes up. Smaller engagements—the estate plan for a young family, the LLC formation for a sole proprietor, the lease review for a first-time commercial tenant—get turned away or handled with the bare minimum of attention. The clients who most need thoughtful legal guidance are precisely the ones least likely to receive it, because their matters do not generate sufficient revenue to justify the investment.
And the spiral reinforces itself. As the experience degrades—as attorneys become less accessible, more transactional, more expensive—clients internalize the lesson. Lawyers are costly and unpleasant and to be avoided until absolutely necessary. Which means they arrive only in crisis. Which means the attorney only ever sees them in reactive mode. Which confirms the attorney’s own model of what the work is. Everyone’s worst assumptions about the relationship are validated by a system that produces exactly the outcomes it was structured to produce.
The result is a systematic degradation of the legal product itself. Not because attorneys lack competence or good intentions, but because the model constrains what competence and good intentions can deliver. The degradation takes two forms, and both are worth naming.
The first is intervention too late. The client arrives after the problem has already calcified. The business has been operating without an operating agreement for three years and now the partners are in a dispute. The estate plan is being drafted at eighty rather than sixty. The landowner signed a preliminary term sheet with a developer without counsel and is now locked into unfavorable terms. In each case, the attorney does skilled work—but the range of achievable outcomes has already been narrowed by the absence of earlier guidance. The medical analogy is amputation: the physician is competent, but the options that drugs or lifestyle changes might have provided are no longer on the table.
The second is insufficient attention. The attorney is not careless. She is rational. She has twelve matters that need movement this week and eight working hours in a day, and the economics demand efficiency. So she works from templates. She makes reasonable assumptions rather than asking the third or fourth question that might reveal a complication. She delivers a competent product but not a complete one—a product shaped by the constraints of her calendar rather than by the full scope of the client’s needs. The medical analogy here is misdiagnosis: the doctor is knowledgeable, but she did not spend enough time with the patient to understand what she was truly looking at.
In neither case is the Law itself the problem. The foundation I described in the first essay remains sound. The moral architecture, the coordination technology, the capacity to make the future real—all of it still works. What is failing is the delivery system. The profession that exists to connect people to the Law’s benefits has organized itself in a way that systematically weakens the connection.
What concerns me most, though, is not the economics or the structural incentives. Those can be changed. What concerns me is that the profession has internalized its own model so completely that it can no longer distinguish between the model and the practice. The billable hour is not experienced as a choice among possible structures. It is experienced as the nature of legal work. Opacity is not experienced as a barrier between the client and the Law’s benefits. It is experienced as the necessary complexity of what attorneys do. The way things are has become indistinguishable from the way things must be.
You can see this most clearly in how the profession adopts new technology. A firm implements a practice management platform—and bolts it onto the billable hour. A firm uses artificial intelligence to draft documents faster—and bills the same rate for less work, or simply takes on more matters without changing how it relates to the client. A firm adds a client portal that automates intake forms—but the fundamental dynamic of the engagement remains untouched. The technology is absorbed into the existing infrastructure without ever questioning the infrastructure itself. It is the equivalent of giving a hospital faster ambulances without asking why no one came in for a checkup.
And here is what I think explains the profession’s deep resistance to genuine structural change. It is not really about technology aversion or generational stubbornness, though both exist. It is that the current model has been in place so long that it no longer looks like a model. It looks like reality. So when someone proposes a fundamentally different approach—a different relationship structure, a different economic model, a different conception of what the attorney provides—it does not register as innovation. It registers as a misunderstanding of what legal practice is.
The scaffolding has been up so long that everyone assumes it is the building.
But it is not the building. The building is the thing I described in the first essay: the Law’s capacity to take human moral intuition and make it functional at scale. The building is the farmer who can plan his retirement because a promise has been made durable. The building is two strangers who can cooperate across difference because a shared structure holds their obligations in place. That is what the legal profession exists to serve. And whether it serves that purpose well depends on a question the profession has largely stopped asking: what, exactly, is the product? What are clients actually paying for? Is it the hours, the process, the drafting rounds and redlines—or is it something else entirely?
That question is the subject of the next essay in this series. But it can only be asked honestly once you see the scaffolding for what it is.