This is a little off topic but these comments make me wonder: why are lawyers so reluctant to give informal advice? I really appreciate the two thoughtful and informed comments at the top of this article here - why the disclaimers? I look for and give informal advice about all kinds of other topics that have the same levels of ambiguity and sometimes the same levels of importance as legal issues but it's always a real challenge to get a lawyer to weigh in informally on a legal issue.
If someone asks me my opinion about an engineering or management issue they're facing, I'll give it to them knowing that I don't know the complete set of facts and they should take my opinion with a grain of salt. I might be missing important context and I might just be wrong. If I ask someone else advice on any topic, I assume that there is an implicit disclaimer. Is there something fundamentally different about the law? Is it because lawyers are in the business of giving advice?
Anyway, appreciate you guys weighing in and hope you do it more frequently :).
> This is a little off topic but these comments make me wonder: why are lawyers so reluctant to give informal advice?
Because an attorney-client relationship is created when the client reasonably believes it to have been created. As a result, you have to be really fucking clear that people are not your clients because, when making the determination of whether someone has reasonably determined that someone is their lawyer, courts look to what the average bloke would think - i.e., a total dumdum. So you really have to hit people over the head with the fact that no, you are not their lawyer.
So, the second part of this is that when an attorney-client relationship is created, the attorney has a tremendous amount of duty to the client, and, if the client acts on the advice of the attorney and gets results they do not like, they can sue the attorney for malpractice.
> If someone asks me my opinion about an engineering or management issue they're facing, I'll give it to them knowing that I don't know the complete set of facts and they should take my opinion with a grain of salt.
Are you a licensed Professional Engineer? If so, for the love of Odin's beard, stop giving informal advice, as you are exposing yourself to professional liability.
Licensed professions - accounting, medicine, law, professional engineering - have extremely high duties of care to their clients. They are exposed to malpractice liability when things go wrong. They have ethical obligations. It can be extremely hard to fire delinquent or terrible clients.
To put it a completely different way: lawyers give advice as their job. There is no such thing as "informal advice" from a lawyer, the same where there is no such thing as a "pick up game" with an NBA player. It is their primary occupation. I don't do it for free - I charge a pretty stiff hourly rate. And every time I take on a client, it has impacts on my firm's malpractice insurance. In fact, I cannot take on clients without the explicit approval of the managing partner at my law firm - I get his written approval for every single one. To make it clear, the managing partner is the guy who, if there was a war between all the lawyers, gets to wear the biggest, fanciest hat. So, no, I am not just going to do the thing I do for my day job as a favor to someone else, any more than your computer programmer friend wants to fix your iphone.
Does that go some distance to answering your question?
> There is no such thing as "informal advice" from a lawyer, the same where there is no such thing as a "pick up game" with an NBA player.
The rest of your post is fascinating, and it made me understand this disclaimer much better; but surely this analogy is misleading.
If I've understood you correctly, there is, legally (or perhaps even by definition?), no such thing as informal advice from a lawyer; but surely it is only conventional that you will probably be in a pick-up game with an NBA player, as no regulation or law prohibits it. (Indeed, by analogy with any field whose practitioners tend to be passionate about it, I would assume that it is quite common for NBA players to play pick-up games with one another.)
Or perhaps, as someone ignorant of all things sports, I have missed the point of the analogy.
The point is that all advice from a lawyer is advice from a lawyer - the same way that an NBA player is still an NBA player whether he is in a playground or on a pro-sports stadium. The point is not what you call the game, it is that the service he is providing - professional level sports ability - remains the same. As in, he is not rendering a different type of service because he is on a playground as opposed to in Madison Square Garden. He is doing literally all the same things, with all the same risks - but for no money. And, importantly, he can still get injured, which would prevent him from doing the thing that makes him all the money.
> Indeed, by analogy with any field whose practitioners tend to be passionate about it, I would assume that it is quite common for NBA players to play pick-up games with one another.
I would be surprised, specifically for the 'injury' reason above. They don't play pick up games - they go to practice - which is supervised and has medical personnel right there. But who knows. That is speculation.
Yes, that's a difference. An NBA player can take it easy, not give his/her best, not slam dunk, not run, watch his/her steps more than the ball - to avoid injury, skip risky defense moves - to avoid injury again, or just because he/she is tired or just not feeling it. And no biggie.
But from a lawyer or an engineer that's not really okay, because even if you say I'm not giving your question my full attention and yeah, I think you'll be okay with just a simple rebar frame and no concrete for your bridge, but don't quote me on that and get a professional's advice ... the asker will be more confident, because he/she just did that, asked a professional, even if not in its proper capacity - and when bridges go down people get angry.
Though thinking about it, people usually get very angry at street ball too!
I think that's exactly what they do sometimes though: and disclaim directly that This Is Not Legal Advice and I Am Not Your Lawyer.
At this point they can take it easy and recommend literally anything since the most painful ramifications have been lifted. If you happen to score against an NBA player in pick-up you might be proud but you'd be dishonest to suggest that this means you have professional skill.
Related question, "... if the client acts on the advice of the attorney and gets results they do not like, they can sue the attorney for malpractice..."
Does that really happen a lot, or is it just something that they drill into you in law school? I never hear about attorney malpractice suits.
Why would you? They are deeply embarassing and lawyers try to make them go away as quickly and quietly as possible. However, the big ones do make the headlines - BUT, while I read Hackernews every day, and you likely do to - do you ALSO read law360, aboveTheLaw and the New York Law Journal? Because that is where you read about malpractice lawsuits. Not on techcrunch. And trust me - they happen all the goddamn time. All the goddamn time. There are lawyers who do nothing but sue other lawyers. There is an entire legal malpractice insurance industry.
And, importantly, if you are a litigator - as in, someone who sues people for a living - your clients are already demonstrably the sorts of people who are willing to sue when they are pissed off. It is not unreasonable to assume that if things go wrong in these circumstances, people turn on their lawyers.
Incompetent lawyers who are unaware of their limits and don't realize they are giving bad advice and corrupt lawyers who think they can get away with deliberately hosing their client are rare cases; the others conservatively avoid giving dangerous advice that could lead to malpractice suits.
This Is Not Legal Advice. (See elsewhere in the thread for why lawyers can't offer "legal advice" to non-clients, even "legal advice that you should have someone else double-check")
I have no law education. When I read IAAL it sounds to me as some professional is about to give me some advice. So I don't really get it why anyone would write that on the internets.
This is how I read it: there is a difference between giving advice and stating facts/giving an opinion. IAAL informs that said opinion/fact has some weight but stating that it is not advice waives any liability as to what one ought to do with whatever statement has been made.
Compare with the following: I am a software engineer, here's my take on this or that technical matter, but don't apply this sample snippet as is in production, also I'm waiving all responsibility, like MIT-license style.
It's not that you shouldn't listen to random professional folks on the internet, it's that when they informally give some opinion on a matter, they may very well be missing some key part of your very specific context, and while common sense just would tell you not to take it as is and that you could hold them liable for anything, J. Random Bloke statistically lacks common sense so one has to spit proactive waiver statements telling people to act on their own responsibility or take advice in a proper, formal client-to-professional context.
> What is the threshold for a reasonable impression of the relationship
"Reasonable belief" is the threshold. There's a whole bunch of case law, of course, on how that applies to specific circumstances, but you aren't going to get a short answer other than the actual standard.
> Could random advice on an internet forum really trigger it?
Maybe; lawyers tend to be fairly conservative about the risk, because the consequences of professional misconduct are potentially quite serious career impacts.
Of all the people commenting about legal topics on the Internet, the probability P(Lawyer) is so low that it would take an especially unreasonable person to honestly believe the discussion creates an attorney-client relationship. But once someone says "I'm a lawyer," I'd guess P(Lawyer) is at least 50%. A mildly retarded but otherwise reasonable person might get the wrong impression at that point.
Depending on legislation it's also not legal for lawyers to give specific advice for free. E.g. in Germany lawyering is a rather heavily regulated business - for obvious reasons - and while there's a whole bunch of exceptions (as usual) in general a lawyer cannot give legal consult for free.
Who is the client? I am French and we do not have this automatic mechanism, a lawyer can provide advice and before I have hired him or her it is just this - advice. In French sites you will get advices without disclaimers, except staying that I may be a dog on Internet and have no idea about what I am taking about.
Is this because HN is located in the US? Would two American citizens have this relationship via a French site?
There are strong legal protections for the attorney-client relationship, such that lawyers are obligated to act scrupulously in their clients' interests. These rules exist for good reason, but a prudent lawyer will want to make it very clear when such a relationship exists and when it doesn't.
But why then, say "this is not legal advice" when you could instead say "I am a lawyer but I'm not your lawyer"?
Or how about "I'm not formally signing off on this statement as a product of my legal-professional persona, but you're free to take what I just wrote to another lawyer and get them to vouch for its veracity, which they probably will"?
I hear that in military and political contexts all the time—"I can tell you this as a friend, but not in my role as X, so go find some other X who's allowed to speak on it if you need formalization"—but I never hear it from lawyers. It always seems to be phrased more as "what I'm about to write is probably wrong and you should go to get your own lawyer who will tell you something entirely different."
If someone asks me my opinion about an engineering or management issue they're facing, I'll give it to them knowing that I don't know the complete set of facts and they should take my opinion with a grain of salt. I might be missing important context and I might just be wrong. If I ask someone else advice on any topic, I assume that there is an implicit disclaimer. Is there something fundamentally different about the law? Is it because lawyers are in the business of giving advice?
Anyway, appreciate you guys weighing in and hope you do it more frequently :).