Who said the following (or something like it): "A trial is just a contest to see which side has the better lawyer"?

A similar quote has been attributed to Hugo Black, an American lawyer, politician, and jurist who served as a U.S. Senator from 1927 to 1937 and as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1937 to 1971. It sounds like the kind of thing he would have said or written, but I have not been able to locate the place where he made the statement.

There can be no equal justice where the kind of trial a man gets depends on the amount of money he has.
Hugo Black

https://www.quotemaster.org/Trial

Also cited here, and a lot of other lists of his quotes.

https://www.azquotes.com/author/1445-Hugo_Black/tag/justice

I believe the quote comes from Justice Black's opinion in Judson GRIFFIN and James Crenshaw, Petitioners, v. The PEOPLE OF THE STATE OF ILLINOIS.

There can be no equal justice where the kind of trial a man gets depends on the amount of money he has.

https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/351/12
(The second to last sentence of paragraph 8)

The saying appears to have first appeared as a definition of a jury, not a trial, in 1904 as a joke in a Kansas newspaper, and then was popularized later that year in the humor book "The Foolish Dictionary" published by "Gideon Wurdz" (the pen name for Charles Wayland Towne). Starting in 1903, Towne made a living as a newspaper correspondent, selling jokes to newspapers, while working on the book, so he was likely the person who first came up with the saying as well.

The joke appeared in the Atchison (KS) Globe in January 1904: "A Hindoo [sp.] who visited this country to study its institutions, visited the court house. 'What's the jury for?' he inquired. 'To decide which side has the better lawyer,' his guide replied."

"JURY-Twelve men chosen to decide who has the better lawyer" was published in The Foolish Dictionary (1904) by "Gideon Wurdz" (Charles Wayland Towne). "Men" would be replaced with "persons" when women were finally allowed to serve on juries.

https://www.barrypopik.com/index.php/new_york_city/entry/a_jury_consists_of_twelve_persons_chosen_to_decide