Cite? No, the way it works is that you pay lawyers who know enough to play it out in their heads and determine who has to pay whom to make it go away. If one side is stubborn and ignorant, then they pull the trigger and the years-long, extremely expensive lottery play has begun.
Your assumptions about the law, about judges, and about rationality, rhetoric, and the justice system in general are about to be destroyed. The lawyers know the high variance of court and generally want to avoid court like the plague.
(The justice system is badly broken, obviously. The core issue is that it takes far too long to judge a case, and a big reason for that is a) the rules are too complicated and b) not adopting better tech. We should have trials that start a week after filing, with online juries, online judges, and real-time access to data. The attorneys can finally earn their ridiculous wages by learning how to fly through information and present it in a compelling way.)
The median lawyer salary is $122K. Whether that's ridiculous is a matter of opinion, but it's only a little higher than software developers. And the average lawyer has more education.
Some civil court hearings are already conducted online.
Your assumptions about the law, about judges, and about rationality, rhetoric, and the justice system in general are about to be destroyed. The lawyers know the high variance of court and generally want to avoid court like the plague.
(The justice system is badly broken, obviously. The core issue is that it takes far too long to judge a case, and a big reason for that is a) the rules are too complicated and b) not adopting better tech. We should have trials that start a week after filing, with online juries, online judges, and real-time access to data. The attorneys can finally earn their ridiculous wages by learning how to fly through information and present it in a compelling way.)