Well, one drawback to the losing party paying legal fees is that it disincentivizes "small" parties from suing larger ones, since they are more likely to lose and less likely to be able to pay.
Germany has fixed attorney fees to solve this problem. There are other measures to reduce this problem. I don't understand them fully, so I won't be more specific. But it kind of works out in the end. You can't just hire an oversized army of lawyers and dump the bill entirely on the losing party.
It seems that Poland has a similar solution* - there are fixed rates and a losing party covers the fees up to that fixed rates. That is anyone is free to hire a lawyer at any rate but the loosing party will have to cover the costs but not more that those fixed rates, so effectively those rates are an upper treshold for repaying legal costs. Additionally a judge may decide that a loosing party does not have to cover those costs - depending on their financial situation (this is a bit more complicated, but since I am not a lawyer I don't know the details here)
*I'm quite sure that this solution in Polish legal system was modelled after the German law.
The "more likely to lose", yes; but even if the system was perfectly fair, the result is not always obvious beforehand (otherwise we wouldn't need a trial in the first place!), and the risk may be too high for a poor litigant.
And in the other way, the power of money outweighs correctness (to which we should add, in both cases, "some of the time.") This is a genuinely hard problem with no clear optimal solution.
As was said, the countries where the losing party pays usually have tables where you can find the legal fees and the maximum amounts that the losing party has to potentially pay.
It would make sense if the amount you have to pay for the other party's legal fees can never be more than what you paid for your own legal fees. That way, a small party fighting a big one will at worst double their legal costs (though that can still be a lot), and if they're sure they will win, they can afford to spend whatever is necessary to get there, because it's still going to be less than what Big Corp is going to spend.
But that's also the big risk: if they're sure they're going to win, spend big to ensure that victory, and then still lose, then they lose far more than they can possibly afford. It's a very risky gamble.
It does, but it also creates an investment opportunity for cases where the chance of winning is high.
The problem with each side paying their own fees is that there is no such beneficial investment scenario for the party that eventually wins. it's all pure losses and then you win but are not really compensated for the financial cost of defense.
