The United States' experience is that law schools and state bar associations, through admissions and licensing, control the number of licensed attorneys and, as economic theory would predict, generally act to restrict that number in order to increase salaries[citation needed] over what a truly free market would produce (and, in the case of law schools, allow an increase in tuition by increasing the financial reward of obtaining a law education).
While the strenuous education and bar exams arguably increase the quality of attorneys at the same time as the cost of employing one, there remain many legal tasks for which a full legal education is unnecessary but some amount of legal training is helpful. This is equally true of most other jurisdictions, many of whom exercise an even tighter control over access to the legal profession.
As the cost of litigation has risen, insurance companies and other clients have increasingly refused to pay for a lawyer to perform these certain kinds of tasks, and this gap has been filled in many cases by paralegals. Paralegal time is typically billed at only a fraction of what a lawyer charges, and thus to the paralegal has fallen those substantive and procedural tasks which are too complex for legal secretaries (whose time is not billed) but for which lawyers can no longer bill. This in turn makes lawyers more efficient by allowing them to concentrate solely on the substantive legal issues of the case, while paralegals have become the "case managers.".
The increased use of paralegals has slowed the rising cost of legal services and serves in some small measure (in combination with contingency fees and insurance) to keep the cost of legal services within the reach of the regular population.
