Lawyers treat urgency as a profit lever, using it to inflate routine costs far beyond anything seen in other professions.
Once people look beneath the surface, they discover a second problem. The law they read is not always the law that applies.
Someone might sign a contract believing that the words on the page will settle any disagreement, only to be told that an old English rule still governs how responsibility is decided.
In many commercial agreements the fine print requires the dispute to be resolved through private arbitration rather than in a public forum.
In other cases there is no arbitration clause at all, but the only formal option is the civil courts, which most people cannot afford to use.
Either way, the process is slow, opaque, and costly.
For anyone who has never used the system before, it feels less like a search for fairness and more like being funnelled into procedures they never chose.
Arbitration is private, so no public precedent is created.
There is no way to see how similar cases were decided before, and no way for anyone in the future to rely on a decision afterwards.
The system resets to zero each time, which keeps ordinary people dependent on lawyers and keeps fees high.
This happens because New Zealand inherited English common law for much of its legal history, and those old rules remain in force unless Parliament or a New Zealand court replaces them.
Most people have no idea that a rule created decades or even centuries ago can still determine a modern dispute.
If there is no modern New Zealand case to guide the outcome, decision-makers fall back on the old English principle, even when it makes little sense to the people involved.
This dependence is then reinforced by a third structural barrier.
Access to justice becomes even harder when the supply of lawyers is deliberately limited. Law schools do not train students to be work-ready.
Firms hire only a small proportion of graduates. Those who are hired are slowly allowed to accumulate the experience needed for practising certificates.
That bottleneck keeps the number of practising lawyers low and keeps hourly rates high. The restriction is structural, not accidental.
It is the opposite of what happens in competitive sectors, where shortages usually trigger more training and more choice for the public.
In every other industry, a shortage of qualified workers leads to training, expansion, and competition. In law, a shortage is treated as a business advantage.
All of this is held together by a fourth factor. The public is told that legal expertise justifies the cost.
Yet much of the work is not complex. Most of it could be handled by capable people if clear instructions and standard forms were available.
The mystique around legal documents is what sustains the price, not the difficulty of preparing them. The idea that every document is a one-off craft item is a key part of the business model.
This is why unaffordable access to justice cannot be solved by tinkering with court rules. The problem starts earlier, in the way lawyers are trained, credentialed, and allowed to control supply.
It continues in the way routine legal tasks are priced as if they require bespoke craftsmanship. It ends with ordinary people locked out of help they reasonably expected to be able to afford.
A system that demands this much money before anyone can even argue their case cannot be described as accessible.
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