Clients take too long to get to the substance of their question,  Lawyers take too long to get to the answer.  For eons, we thought it was all about nuance and details, a firm grasp of the necessary facts and a thorough response addressing the potential variations, possibilities and their respective probabilities.

Few things have better characterized a changing mindset than this: TwitterLaw.  Forget the nuance. Forget the details.  Forget the corner office with the leather Chesterfield sofa. Cut to the chase.  Get your question down to 140 characters and get an answer in kind.

Over at Legal Blog Watch, Bruce Carton picked up on Simon Fodden’s  Slaw post decrying the advent of a British firm offering legal advice by twit:

Good grief: it’s the (I should have expected it) reductio ad absurdum of legal advice. Until now, the briefest piece of wise legal counsel was “It depends.” Now a UK lawyer is offering free advice in 140 characters, which, though longer than that gold standard, doesn’t seem wiser.

A smiling man styled only as The Legal Oracle (@thelegaloracle) is offering on Twitter:

Tweet your legal claim or question and we will answer it free of charge. Taking the fear and mystery away and making law accessible.

Speaking of “fear and mystery”, who in his or her right mind would take legal advice from an unnamed person in 140 characters?

Someone who wants a quick and dirty answer to a legal question and either can’t or won’t pay for it?

Carton, the illegitimate offspring of Bud Abbott (along with his young sidekick, Eric Lippman), suggests that this turn of events would make me swoon.  Not so fast, Carton.  While silly and pretentious, this quirk in the space/time continuum is the brainchild of Loyalty Law, a shameless, self-promoting UK legal marketer.  They don’t call them solicitors for nothing, you know.

But the @thelegaloracle concept, crazy as it seems, has some things that many of the other faux free legal answer concepts lack.  First, it’s short and to the point.  While that’s considered a flaw by many, it’s no worse a flaw than something like Avvo Answers, where a person uses as many characters as he wants to ask a legal question, typically providing tons of fluff or self-serving excuses to spin the answer received, and still asking the wrong question in the wrong way to get a meaningful answer.

Then the question is answered by people neither more qualified nor substantively capable of providing a correct answer, the twitter guy.  None of these ideas are a substitute for a proper consultation, and none of these answers provide greater reliability or merit.  At least Twitter Law is quick and dirty.  Better to be wrong in 140 characters than 3000 words.

The UK lawyer doing yeoman duty, Nicholas Jervis, hasn’t gotten a lot of question as yet. but the few I’ve seen are pretty basic and his answers are similarly basic.  They’re also quick, free and clear.  The beauty seems to be that it’s hard to ask a convoluted, overwrought, deeply personal question via twitter.  The medium just doesn’t offer much depth, such that the questions are sufficiently simple to allow for a simple answer in response.

This is way better than the free legal advice promoted elsewhere, where it’s suggested that they are a real substitute for actual legal advice.  They’re not.  They’re awful.  They’re dangerous, as people actually think they’ve been given a reliable answer to complex legal problems.  On twitter, it’s all superficial, and that seems to work.

For example,  one question (copied in the Slaw post) had to do with the statute of limitations for negligence, to which Jervis responded :

Hi Katie, 3 years is the norm, more if you/the victim is under 18 at the time of the accident or not of full capacity.

Where’s the problem?  No doubt there are questions that can’t be answered within the constraints of twitter, and even less doubt that some questions will be poorly framed and thus poorly answered.  So what?  Unlike those free legal answer sites which pretend to be a substitute for real advice, no one can possibly believe that a twit is a substitute for a lawyer.

It is what it is, and what it isn’t is reliable, personalized legal advice.  But then, it’s not supposed to be.  It’s just the next step in legal marketing as we slip/slide down the slope to the gutter.  But as far as lawyers strutting around in hot pants goes, Jervis is kinda cute.

On the other hand, given the attention span of the twitter audience, combined with the depth of thought, few concepts are better suited to the needs of modern iPad users. 

In fact, I see this as the precursor to private binding arbitration via twitter, with each side getting 10 twits to make their case. twitpics to show their evidence and a decision within minutes and paypal to deliver the award second later.  Though brevity is the soul of wit, there’s nothing funny about this idea. Is this any less reliable a means of resolving disputes than our legal system? Think about it.