As for him, yeah I'm sure that's part of it, but he's saying the form of my fees itself is the problem.
No, no, no, the fact that you're beating him and charging less is the problem, the form of your fees is merely his attempted route to a solution.
I imagine the biggest problem with that math is that your playing the odds with no fallback. Insurance companies work by being big, and you're essentially working as law insurance, and at lower rates than would be required even under a fairly good market to maintain the average lifestyle expected of you.
Never attained or maintained the lifestyle expected of me. Catch-22 people expect me to have it but refuse to pay for it through fees until I... have... it.... Similar to, not same as, insurance. They cover you and everyone else they can. I have to turn down conflicts of interest and basically be almost "on call." (Insurance says its on call; it isn't).
I can do X work in a year. The more people I spread the cost over, the less each person pays, but the greater risk I won't be able to do everything I'm supposed to do, or would need to take on clients I've implicitly agreed not to take.... It's about essentially allocating chunks of my time and spreading out my operations capacity over a payment structure for people in a group. Smaller the group, larger payment and smaller risk. Larger the group, smaller payment and bigger risk. In addition to my time, there's operations expenses (excluding labor) and there are unfortunately more expenses than you'd think.
Meh. Clerk has screwed up several of my deeds and I'm going to have to go fix them. Confound you, woman, you'll be the death of me.... [mumbles and rants for several minutes while fixing typos and blatant incompetence] Don't you look at me like it doesn't matter that there's a 3 inch margin on the top of the first page and a 1.5 inch margin on the top of every page after the first. The county recorder charges you $20 if you don't have that, PER DEED! They use a transparent plastic little sheet and put it over the deed and if your text starts above or on the line it's $20. [more mumbling, unconfirmed grumbling, certainly fixing bumbling, more mumbling and confirmed grumbling this time
].