The legal profession, usually ignored by Whitehall, finds itself currently the stuff of political debate, mostly for negative reasons. Last week the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) unveiled its long-awaited policies on reforming civil litigation costs in a minor blaze of publicity about ambulance-chasing lawyers.

Within days, that typical hotbed of tabloid controversy – The Law Society's annual statistical report – was enough to start a half-baked debate about the number of fat-cat lawyers exceeding those of police officers, supposedly off the back of the twin growth engines of legal aid and the Human Rights Act.

Mixed with this has been angst about what the growth of the legal profession says about the country and fears of an over-supply of students aspiring to be lawyers.

Some of the sniping is justified. The deal struck by the last Labour administration to allow success fees to be charged to the losing party undoubtedly led to some excesses from the claimant Bar. There was one particularly striking figure cited by the MoJ in announcing the costs shake-up: in 1999, claimant solicitors' costs were equivalent to 56% of the damages agreed in personal injury cases. By 2010, solicitors' costs had risen to 142% of received damages.

Overall, the reforms put forward look to be a considered rebalancing of the system away from a regime that fuelled abuse in a small part of the market but one that too often managed to drag the profession's name into the mud.

But it is easy to get carried away with such arguments. Government policy on the oft-discussed compensation culture in the UK seems to be that this is largely a myth – but it is believed to exist, and therefore action to curb it is justified. Yet the line on these issues is never easily drawn – one person's access to justice is another's compensation culture, it just depends which side of the claim you are on.

The debate about the size of the legal profession is a reheating of an old favourite. The logic is that lawyers don't produce anything, so it's worrying when we have so many of them. Well, they do produce something – they produce legal advice. And if we're going to start complaining about the tilt of the UK economy towards the services sector, it's a bit late in the day and entirely arbitrary to single out the legal profession (all this before you get into the export value of English law and the globally-recognised success of our law firms).

While it's true that there has been sustained expansion of the legal profession – it has more than tripled over the last 30 years – frenetic levels of legislative and regulatory activity by successive governments and the rise of the City as a financial centre have played a far greater role in this than fat-cat legal aid lawyers or a litigation culture. The profession will presumably wait for such controversies to pass – after all, it doesn't have much in the way of a coherent message to counter them.