Some time ago I was cleaning out a desk and found a copy of the old (and now illegal) minimum fee schedule. The idea of a floor on legal services was first discussed at the then brand-new Connecticut Bar Association at one of its earliest meetings in the late 1800s. I am not sure when the thing was finally adopted, but by the 1950s the American Bar Association was urging that all bars adopt such a protocol and some states had even issued ethics opinions announcing a willingness to accept less than the customary published fees was a form of prohibited advertising.
Unfortunately, during my second year of law school, in 1975, the U.S. Supreme Court in Goldfarb v. State Bar of Virginia outlawed fee schedules as anticompetitive. Three years later, in Bates v. Arizona, the other shoe dropped when the Supreme Court OK’d lawyer advertising. If anyone (including my fellow members of the class of 1977) had begun their law schooling thinking they were entering a field immune from the laws of economics (“We’re a profession, not a business”), they began their careers learning the lessons of market economics.
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