A Financial Times columnist points out that Obama’s Transition Economic Advisory Board is mostly lawyers.. Willem Buiters fires a familiar broadside at lawyers
"… in the US, the legal profession … has become a veritable succubus preying on the body politic and on the economic resource base of the country – the ultimate rent-seeking, wealth destroying profession. According to Legal Reform Now! there are 1,143,358 lawyers in the US, one for every 200 adults. The main problem is not that there are over a million socially unproductive lawyers in the US. The problem is that these lawyers are an essential component of a dysfunctional legal framework that has created the most litigious society in the world. The damage this dysfunctional legal framework causes must be measured not primarily by the direct cost of litigation, astounding though it is, but through the actions not undertaken and the creative and productive deeds not done because of fear of litigation."
That last sentence is the key. I see it in people I work with, in my children, in timid public officials, in service providers every day. They become uncertain, anxious about doing things out of the ordinary, taking any kind of risk that is not in familiar channels. Getting drunk is a familiar risk. Building your own building, learning to drive a bulldozer by doing, is not.
A young guy I know has become an expert truck driver without ever getting a licence, because the normal process now involves formal training and courses and tests that would cost around $3000.
Buiters goes on:
"Except for a depressingly small minority among them, lawyers know nothing. They are incapable of logic. They don’t know the difference between necessary and sufficient conditions or between type I and type II errors. Indeed, any concept of probability is alien to them. They don’t understand the concepts of opportunity cost and trade off. They cannot distinguish between normative and positive statements. They are so focused on winning an argument through technicalities, that they no longer would recognise the truth if it bit them in the butt. If you are very lucky, a lawyer will give you nothing but the truth. You will never get the truth, let alone the whole truth. Things have degenerated to the point that lawyers and the legal profession not only routinely undermine justice, but even the law.
Some exaggeration but depressingly defensible. The lawyer establishment has such a hold now that it is not feasible to challenge a lawyer consensus with simple common sense. You’ll need your own lawyer.
RSS feeds available for 
Stephen you state:-
“The lawyer establishment has such a hold now that it is not feasible to challenge a lawyer consensus with simple common sense. You’ll need your own lawyer.”
So how do we change this?