As long ago as 1852, Charles Dickens, in Bleak House, was already making fun of the legal profession with the case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce—in which two teams of barristers keep the battle over a huge estate alive for more than a lifetime, until they’ve devoured the whole thing, whereupon they simply declare the matter moot and move on. The moral of the story is that when a profit-seeking enterprise is in the business of distributing a very large sum of money, the most profitable thing for it to do is to be as inefficient as possible.
