I spent a few minutes yesterday searching to see what other lawyers had to say about their area of law (other than criminal), and came upon website after website offering people free legal advice. Some, like Avvo, named the lawyers who gave of their time, while others “verified” that the answers came from unnamed “legal experts.”
How do I say this nicely? It was shocking. It was free, for sure, but much of the “advice” was dead wrong. I mean, horribly wrong. Grossly wrong. Just plain wrong. How many people are harmed by the free advice they find on the internet? We’ll never know, but they are most assuredly harmed.
The phenonmenon of free legal advice as a come-on to people who either can’t or won’t pay a lawyer to provide them with reliable, or at least accountable, legal counsel is not only here to stay, but has become overwhelmingly pervasive. Websites I’ve never heard of are telling folks how to conduct their legal affairs and relationships. And the nice people who ask questions, or read the questions asked by others, get answers. And the answers are wrong.
We are harming people, and we need to stop harming people.
From what I saw, there are a few problems that keep reappearing. By no means does this exhaust the problems of bad legal advice online, but these issues appear over and over.
1. Not your area of “expertise.” I put “expertise” in quotation marks because many lawyers are generalists and have no area of expertise. Others have expertise in a particularly niche, maybe even a micro-niche, but just can’t control the urge to stray outside the lines and give advice peculiar to a particular jurisdiction or particular subset of a practice area to issues that are clearly beyond their tiny pond.
You think you can help? Grow up. Wise up. Just because you’re all puffy about your brilliance as a lawyer doesn’t mean that you have anything to offer in areas of law you neither know nor practice. Yes, your spouse tells you how smart you are. Your mother is proud of you. Your clients think your the ginchiest. Who cares?
Let’s talk lawyer to lawyer, a bit of truth. You aren’t spending your time researching your answer. You know that it’s not going to land you in a malpractice suit or grievance. You know that you’re doing it to promote yourself, and that the poor schmuck on the receiving end isn’t going to know whether your advice is decent or utter crap. Hell, it’s free and, well, close enough. And you think you’re right. Guess what? You’re not.
2. You’re not yet a lawyer but you play one on the internet. It’s like a meme (a word best understood by digital natives that older folks can’t quite understand) that young lawyers are every bit as good, knowledgeable and worthy as experienced lawyers. The only difference is that they couldn’t get a job out of law school, because us old lawyers screwed the whole profession up and left them holding the bag for a couple hundred thou in debt and no place to go every day, so they have to scramble online to buy their next bag of Cheetos.
The old maxim that an old fool is worse than a young fool comes up from time to time. The anecdote about the old time lawyer who is clueless gets tossed about. The stories about partners who can’t type out their old emails, or haven’t cracked a casebook in half a century abound. And to some extent, it’s all true.
Yet this is utter nonsense that betrays self-serving stupidity. If you’re such a brilliant lawyer two weeks out of law school, how much more brilliant will you be with ten years of experience under your belt? Oh, but that’s you, right. You’re different. You’re special. You’re not like all those other lawyers, who are wrong and stupid.
Maybe you are brilliant. Probably not, but let’s massage your child’s ego for a moment. Do you not think you will be a better lawyer with experience? Do you not think that those who have experience have gained something from it? Do you not think there are other lawyers, at least smart if not as brilliant as you, who have more experience and know more than you do?
These experienced lawyers have a depth of understanding of what the law is, how the law works, and how problems are best addressed that you don’t have. Not because you aren’t brilliant, but because you’ve never actually practiced the law, experienced what works and what doesn’t, seen where seemingly correct advice goes disastrously wrong.
I do not believe that the lawyers who are playing the free advice game have an intention of harming anyone, misleading anyone, giving really awful advice. There’s no benefit to them in doing so, and most of us have at least a smidgen of conscience that makes us want to help others. But the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
Stop harming people, even if you don’t mean to. Stop adding to the stupidity of the internet. If you do not really know your stuff, if you do not have the experience to know that your very authoritative answer is correct, don’t do it. So what if you won’t make Level 42 contributor on Avvo, or the $10 some misbegotten “answer” website pays its “experts.” Do you not care that people are reading your words and believing them? Do you not care that someone out there is worse for having coming across your advice?
* Correct Answer are not free,
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Why should the legal profession be any different from any other? People also give (and take) free medical advice which has a greater potential for harm.
In some cases, the advice may even be correct.
There may even have been an instance where your legal advice was wrong. (I know I’m stretching here, but you get my point).
The Internet is free, so there is no barrier to publishing or commenting.
I frequently offer free advice in my area of expertise. I also benefit by the huge volume of shared experience which is instantly searchable on the Internet.
Caveat emptor.
If I was a physician, I might very well have something stern to say about free medical advice. But I’m a lawyer, and I can’t stand seeing the crap on free legal advice websites that’s dead wrong. That other occupations or professions may have the same problem changes nothing. This is mine, and so I write about it.
Meh, I’d blame those who rely on the free advice for their harm. I’d blame those who give it not for the harm they offer to others, but for being incompetent, self-serving hacks.
You know what’s worse? When you find these both of these two character flaws in one person. See an example of such a breeding ground at outlinedepot.com
You missed a category of “free advice.” I’m not a lawyer; I’m a cop. People ask me for legal advice all the time. While I don’t, and if I answer legal questions, I make it clear my degree of expertise and it’s limitations. My general advice is to consult a lawyer with appropriate expertise. And if your liberty is at stake, get the best lawyer you can beg, borrow or sell your firstborn to afford. But I know more than a few cops who hand out “legal advice”…
And an amusing aside… I don’t know how often it happens in courts in your area, but I’ve seen it happen several times over my career. A defendant shows up — usually over some pretty minor traffic charge. They plead not guilty, and the case proceeds to trial. You see them start looking over to someone in the audience in the courtroom for prompting… And the judge calls them on it. The idiot in the crowd? He’s a law student (or a criminal justice major). Or was… because I know in at least one case, the guy got arrested. In another? The judge said, from the bench, that he’d be calling the dean of the law school during the recess.
There was actual a website, and I can’t recall the name, where a cop was giving out specific legal advice to questioners. It was utterly bizarre. Legally, his advice was nuts. From his perspective (“if you did the crime, you should surrender and plead guilty”), it made perfect sense.
I love how you put yourself up on a pedestal with your perfect and sound views on legal advice. We all know the rules on legal advice. Every attny is an individual and it is likely that they would voice a different opinion/strategy on a similar situation. Any “real” attny knows how often the same incident, with the same victim, with the same at-fault pty, could have multiple outcomes. It must feel incredibly empowering to sit back and harp on these newbees bc practice does make close too perfect. But advice is advice. A gun wasn’t put to their head to act on it. It was a post with a strategy that happened to work for that particular case and for whatever reason, those years of L school led him in that direction. You know as well as i do that every entity/body in every case is diff than the last, so to sit back and act all high and mighty like you’ve never said the wrong thing or had a strategy backfire is absurd. Take it for what it is; these newbees are actually trying to make something of themselves, and they hav to start somewhere. As long as they finish with the golden statement, “I can’t guarantee this will work blah blah blah”, then get off your high horse and show some flippin respect to ppl that ARE actually trying to obtain the credibility so they can one day jump on their high horse and talk down to attnys just like you. Maybe you should spend more time building a successful law firm and less time talkin down to kids that were once in your position.
I love how you justify being a whiny, blithering idiot, as long as you include a disclaimer.