Wednesday, May 3, 2017

Forget Nebraska and Make Haste for the Delta

It's repeated refrain that down-on-their-luck law grads in urban areas just need to pick up the Million Dollar Express in more rural settings.  Nebraska is a common example of an area pining for lawyers: bleakly married couples going undivorced, scummy drug dealers being set free, state government grinding to a halt the bureaucrats up and down the organizational chart await that precious thumbs up from the harried legal department...

But what if I told you there was an even better get-rich scheme? Here, in this article praising third tier law schools for their innovative academical gris-gris, comes the down-low info of where you really need to send your lazy law graduates:
Nationally, the average ratio of population to lawyer is roughly 250:1, according to Michael Hunter Schwartz, dean of the William H. Bowen School of Law at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. In Arkansas, it’s 500:1, and in the state’s delta region, it’s 4,000:1.
Ca-ching!

What are all these ridiculous lawyers doing?  Anyone within a dead body's throw of Bylthville or Stuttgart should be setting up shop! 

4000-to-1!  Since lawyers are sixteen times as scarce as in the rest of the country, we know by the power of Math! that demand for each lawyer if sixteen times as much.

I know some of you aren't exactly diamond-level economists, so I'll give you a hint:  lower supply and higher demand means higher price for you.

If $200 represents a fair fee for legal services nation-wide, in the Arkansas Delta you can expect to charge $3,200 an hour.  Your trip on the Million Dollar Express just got a lot shorter.  In fact, 313 hours and you'll hit a million in revenue.

That's a lot of money just sitting in the Arkansas Delta doing nothing, just waiting for an intrepid lawyer to come and get rich serving these terribly under-served folks.

5 comments:

  1. Those poor fools can pay their attorneys, in cabbage or potatoes. What a thriving "profession."

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  2. And how much money do these yokels have to spend on legal services? Could that have anything to do with the ratio of people to lawyers? I'm willing to help out the lemmings who move there. Be ready to answer this question which you will frequently get in free initial consultations. "We live in Arkansas now but we got married in Mississippi. If we get divorced here, in the eyes of the law, will we still be brother and sister?"

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. What does a girl from West Virginia say when she loses her virginity?

      "Cut it out, Pa; you're crushin' my Marlboros."

      Delete
  3. There are no lawyers in the Arkansas Delta because no one wants to live in the Arkansas Delta.
    The ONLY thing in the Arkansas Delta is millions of acres of rice fields and the occasional shack.

    ReplyDelete