At the same time, the complexity of litigation seems to be increasing. Even if a case is settled without trial, preliminary motions and discovery procedures may occupy much time of judges and attorneys. Moreover, the country has experienced a marked growth in statutes and administrative regulations; the number of federal agencies jumped from twenty to seventy in the last two decades while the pages of federal regulations tripled in the 1970s alone. Paralleling these trends, the supply of lawyers has doubled since 1960 so that the United States now boasts the largest number of attorneys per thousand population of any major industrialized nation – three times as many as in Germany, ten times the number in Sweden, and a whopping twenty times the figure in Japan. In sum, though there may not be more court cases, the country has more legal work to do and many more attorneys to do it. Just what society pays for this profusion of law is hard to guess. Lloyd Cutler has put the figure at $30 billion a year, but the truth is that no one has bothered to find out. Be that as it may, legal costs are primarily people costs, and if we mark the growth in the total number of lawyers and the average compensation of attorneys, it is clear that legal expenditures have been climbing more rapidly than the gross national product for many years.