The wave of legal services reforms across the globe in recent years has brought lawyers into conflict with economists, whose work has often been used to justify government action by showing how inefficient the legal profession is.


The lawyers argue that you cannot apply pure economics to the law - best known as the 'it's not like selling a tin of beans' argument - because it fails to factor in intangible values, particularly the pivotal role lawyers play in upholding basic democratic principles such as access to justice and the rule of law. Put even more simply, it is not just about the level of fees.



And so the argument has raged, but the lawyers possibly gained the upper hand following last month's EU conference on 'The economic case for professional services reform'. Much of the debate centred around legal services, and it was at the point Gabriel Lee stood up that his fellow economists lost ground. A member of the department of real estate at Regensburg University in Germany, his riveting paper was a case study analysing 'the entry effects on competition conduct (mark-ups) in the Bavarian notary profession' - where there are, apparently, substantial restrictions on entering the market.



He came to the not entirely unsurprising conclusion that fewer restrictions would lead to more competition and lower fees, and that this would be a good thing. But he reached it with some eye-watering equations, such as the one above.



Now, we at Obiter Towers do not wish to decry the work of economists simply because we have not the faintest idea what they are going on about, but does this make a useful contribution to the big issues surrounding legal services reform?



However, Mr Lee did cause one of the few amusing moments of a rather dry event when questioning another speaker, during which he suggested that Italy may have something of a corruption problem. The meeting chairman, no doubt in the interests of European unity, deemed the question inappropriate and asked that it be struck from the official record. Perhaps no economist has ever proved it.