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I agree that there are bad attorneys out there, I'm just skeptical that self-help remedies offer any improvement. I did consumer-side law for a few years and the amount of "preparation" a client does in a legal sense (and not just having the right documents together) is usually inversely proportional to how easy it was for me to handle their case. At best these people would read about worst case scenarios and freak themselves out; these were the easy cases because these people tended to be very trusting and did an emotional 180 at the end of the consult. The worst were the people who were convinced they knew how I should handle the case and second-guessed my every decision. No, I am not going to try that One Weird Trick that's not going to work and might get me sanctioned. Yes, after much cajoling, I may be willing to put together a bunch of exotic entities that you heard about, but only after trying to talk you out of them, and only because if I lose you as a client you'll go to someone else who will charge you more and won't do the job right.
I did a lot of bankruptcy and estate administration and the problem with those isn't so much that clients have a ton of questions but that there's a flurry of activity right at the beginning followed by a lot of waiting, and they get worried if they haven't heard from you in a while and all you can tell them is that it's a waiting game. I'm not going to get into the workflow and how the consults are usually constructed, but in these kinds of cases the client is meeting with the attorney enough in the early stages that there's plenty of opportunity to ask questions. Like I said, LLMs weren't a thing quite yet, but there was a lot of Google, plus people like Suze Orman and Dave Ramsey, and I specifically instructed my clients to avoid the internet and pop financial gurus and if they wanted general information I recommended good publications that were easily available in libraries. But I can't imagine that telling them to direct their questions to an LLM would inspire much confidence.
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