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ence others in the supply chain to accept moreefficient settlement and litigation procedures.Their clients, often opponents in a conflict, arenot very likely to cooperate in order to find themost efficient process. The incentives on lawyers,who are in a unique position as professionalsbecause they can directly create work for eachother, are very different from those in a normalsupply chain. There, producers, distributors andclients all have the same incentives to cut thetransaction costs, because there is an exposureto outside competition. The incentives on judgesand other neutrals may also work against standardisation.They have no duty to the disputants tomake a trade-off between costs and quality whenthey organise the process through their decisionson procedure, and in some legal systems they aresupposed to leave the management of the procedureto the parties.These issues regarding the management of thejustice supply chain have, as far as the WorkingGroup could establish, not yet been studied indepth (Hadfield 2000 is one of the exceptions).An open question is, for instance, why legalservices to individuals tend to be performed byindividual lawyers, or small partnerships, and notby bigger companies that offer standard servicesfor common problems, such as is the case forbanking and insurance. Another issue is wherethe responsibility for the design and improvementof procedures should be located: Is this primarilythe task of the legislator, of the judiciary, or isthere a role here for bottom up processes as well?We now turn to this topic of improving the designof procedures Simplifying ProceduresAn attractive approach to reducing legal transactioncosts wholesale, rather than attempting tosubsidise these costs on a retail basis, would beto simplify the substantive and procedural law.One essential step could be to allow individualsto advance their legal claims without representationin small claims courts or other moreinformal tribunals (Lopez-de-Silanes 2002,Buscaglia and Ulen 1997). Adopting this approachis probably not without costs: Simplifyinglaws so that they can be understood and invokedby uneducated lay people may require makinglaws cruder, less nuanced, and less efficient,although some may argue that targeting lawsbetter to the problems of the poor may have theopposite effect. If the legislator has sufficientinformation and background analysis regardingwhat constitute the most common concerns andgrievances of poor people and other disadvantagedgroups, the substantive legislation may betailored to be receptive to such grievances.There may be several layers within pieces oflegislation that aim at different target groupsensuring that principles of equality and nondiscriminationare adhered to, whilst on anotherlevel the legislation is drafted in a sufficientlysophisticated manner to cater for the needs fornuances and detail. Administering laws in smallclaims courts or informal tribunals entails dispensingwith some of the procedural safeguardsthat attend more formal legal proceedings, andthe adjudicators in such forums may be lesscompetent. However, many of the legal issues ofpoor people are reasonably simple in legal termsthe problem is that they are met with overtly andunnecessary completed procedures that onlywork to exclude the poor from justice settlementmechanisms.One way of dealing with this is to provide peoplewith ‘simple’ and ‘sophisticated’ procedures nextto each other. Poor plaintiffs will then be able tochoose the procedure they find is most appropriateto their problem and circumstances. However,this requires clear consumer information, andnecessitates designing ‘simple’ procedures that38