Brokers May Have to Put Customers First

Best interests.

I went to law school and was a lawyer for a while, and as part of going to law school and being admitted to the bar you spend a lot of time thinking about fairly recondite conflicts of interest between lawyers and their clients. But there's one dumb simple conflict of interest between lawyers and their clients, which is that clients normally pay lawyers money for legal services, and lawyers want to get paid a lot, and clients do not want to pay a lot. This is a hard conflict to talk about, because, one, it is not very interesting, and two, there is not a lot you can do about it. You can say that lawyers should charge a reasonable hourly rate instead of an unreasonable one, but that doesn't actually address the conflict, which is that the lawyer will want that rate to be high and the client will always want it to be low. And you can say that lawyers shouldn't bill unnecessary hours, but it is hard to know which hours are necessary and which aren't, and the person best situated to know is probably the lawyer, and she's the one billing the hours. And so lawyers occasionally get in trouble for egregious overbilling, and law firms get their bills negotiated down all the time, but in general firms do not get in trouble for being extremely thorough in assigning associates to do legal research on a client's behalf. If in their legal judgment the lawyers think a lot of research is necessary, well, the fact that that research is also profitable for them is just a fact.