Marty reads the USA Today article about his son. “Within two hours of his arrest, Martin McFly, Jr. was tried, convicted, and sentenced to 15 years in the state penitentiary! Within two hours?”
“The justice system works swiftly in the future now that they’ve abolished all lawyers.”
In 1977, Chief Justice Warren E. Burger said, “We may well be on our way to a society overrun by hordes of lawyers, hungry as locusts, and brigades of judges in numbers never before contemplated.” At that time, there were 431,918 lawyers in the United States and 32,597 new lawyers each year. By Marty’s time of 1985, there were 653,686 lawyers and 36,829 new ones each year. As of 2013, there were 1,268,011 lawyers with 46,478 new ones that year.
Over the same period of 1985 to 2013, the population increased 75% even though the lawyer population has nearly doubled.
Lawyers haven’t been abolished, but it is difficult for graduating lawyers to find positions. Nine months after receiving their law degrees, 11.2% of the class of 2013 was still unemployed. Part of this is a result of the Internet and globalization. Online legal guidance (other than armchair lawyers leaving comments) is easily accessible and companies like LegalZoom make it easy to obtain legal documents quickly, easily, and with low fees.
In our 2015, the justice system is anything but swift. It can take years to fix a bridge and anything online runs the risk of attracting hungry lawyers looking for a copyright, trademark, or licensing lawsuit. The future Doc tells us about sounds great, but it’s not what we’ve got.
Prediction Accuracy: Failed
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