There were a variety of cases. Some wanted to bar the attorneys from working for the other side in the dispute after their initial consult.
There was at least one case of someone suing over bad advice, but that too was a case of someone who consulted an attorney in a professional capacity, i.e. as someone looking to hire an attorney, not a message board/cocktail party situation.
What are you claiming?
Here’s one: one.
Note that being sued isn’t the only risk here. A more palpable (and less avoidable) risk is that of censure or other sanctions from one’s bar association for the unlicensed practice of law. For example, any of the lawyers giving Stoid advice could get in serious trouble with their own bar associations if they’re not licensed in California.
To consult an attorney in her professional capacity is merely to consult her as a lawyer because she is a lawyer. It has nothing to do with being ready to cut a retainer check. It has nothing to do with meeting in an office with many leather-bound books and smelling of rich mahogany.
To make it perfectly plain:
Notice, there is nothing about being a paying client. There is not even anything about an intention to create a lawyer-client relationship. It is the asker’s intent to receive legal services from a lawyer that opens up the possibility of a lawyer-client relationship.
In Stoid’s case, she sought advice, a legal service. Moreover, a disclaimer would be of doubtful effectiveness. If the lawyer knows/reasonably should know that any disclaimer will be disregarded and the information provided will be relied upon, there is a colorable claim that a lawyer-client relationship exists. The bar association takes a dim view of the efficacy of rote–and situationally incongruent–disclaimers.
Moreover, malpractice claim are just one hazard. The relationship, and even proto-relationships, give rise to issues of conflicts of interest and confidentiality, among other things
This guy got in trouble with the bar for unauthorized practice of law for:
despite not being a lawyer.
I think that’s a lot more egregious than a lawyer offering up some advice on a MB accompanied by a disclaimer. (Note that even this guy beat the rap - this does not relate to RNATB’s point, but is an aside to the rest.)
Kimmy_Gibbler, my remarks here were about the actual likelihood of being sued, so your comments about other issues are irrelevant.
Christ almighty, you want a figure? Okay, the likelihood is three. It is three likely that someone will be sued by Stoid.
Three.
Now would you pay attention to all these nice people who are explaining to you in small words why legal advice is legal advice?
I three hope there’s an election or something coming up so we can be done with these goddamn attorney threads. And that child-hater one. Fuck that too.
Sorry, I forgot that you’re retarded.
In fact, your post suggested that there could be no malpractice suit because there would be no attorney-client relationship. That’s what your talk about “consulting in a professional capacity” was about. You asserted that because your implicit claim was “it is unlikely, because there is no basis in law for a such a suit.”
As we’ve endeavored to show you on multiple occasions, you are incorrect. Your modus operandi is to make the assertion that there is no legal basis for a malpractice suit, for us to show you cases that do establish such a legal basis, followed by your complaint that this does not show the likelihood of such suits and ask us for examples of such lawsuits, and then claim the lawsuits are not sufficiently analogous and therefore no legal basis exists for the suit. It is a neat parlor trick, but not one that I am falling for again.
Oh, no – you find the argument “unconvincing”? Why, exactly, should anyone give a shit what your opinion is in that regard? Again, several attorneys have said that ITO it is an argument with some weight. Why should your single layperson’s opinion to the contrary outweigh the opinions of multiple professionals in what is, after all, the heart of their profession?
The mistake being made here is that people are actually attempting to respond to you in good faith. Instead, IMO they should be just shrugging off your “unconvinced” opinion as completely irrelevant to a professional reality you know nothing about and therefore are in no position to judge. And in case you were wondering, Exhibit A as to your personal ignorance is your apparent belief that no attorney could possibly get in hot water professionally unless there’s a published case out there that says so.
Really? A bunch of primadonna lawyers are bitching about people asking questions they are not obligated to answer and I am the stupid one?
Riiiiggghhht.
You poor lawyers no one has a sympathy for your plight. I think the lawyer persecution complex is by far the most comical.
So all it would take to screw you over is claim we had a conversation at a cocktail party. It would be irrelevant if we’d ever even been at that cocktail party? It would be consequenceless for me and you’d be censured for it?
If you get to make up the other side’s arguments, it’s a lot easier to argue. I’ve not claimed any of those things, either explicitly or implicitly, in this particular discussion.
RNATB pointed out that even if you were to win any lawsuit it’s a hassle to get involved in one to begin with. I pointed out that if such lawsuits (later extended to bar sanctions) are so rare that no can come up with a single instance of one in an analogous situation, then it’s not a real concern.
What you’re trying to argue is that from a legal standpoint there is no difference between a lawyer offering advice to a friend at a cocktail party and a lawyer offering advice to a potential client at an initial consultation in his office. Now you may be right and you may be wrong, but if as a practical matter no one has apparently ever been sued in the former situation while people have been sued in the latter situation, then there would appear to be a practical difference, whether or not there is a legal one.
Since RNATB was commenting on the practical fear of having to deal with a lawsuit, and not on the merits of such a lawsuit, what’s significant is whether there is a realistic chance of being sued, not whether from a legal standpoint it’s analogous to some other situation in which people have been sued.
Well what I am seeing is a bunch of lawyers bitching and moaning about how put upon they are. If you don’t want to answer a question on a message board, then don’t.
Don’t you have “massage quandaries” (If I’m having sexytime with my special lady, should I use sandalwood oil or patchouli?) that you should be “counseling” people about?
I don’t actually believe this.
But I do think if there was any reasonable risk that such a thing might actually happen, it would probably have actually happened by now.
A statistical and not a legal argument, and not something that lawyers have any expertise about. But one simple enough that they probably understand it.
Why do you keep asking me questions about prostitution? What does sex have to do with Massage?
It helps to actually read the whole thing. I will excerpt some of the more pertinant parts for you.
First, there’s the part that you may have read, but I’ll put it here because it matters.
Hmmm… I wonder what the board considers to be the unauthorized practice of law. Let’s read on, shall we?
I have bolded the parts that I think are of particular import. In summary: Palmer got sued for posting advice on the internet. The type of advice that he was demonstrated to have dispensed was the type of generic boilerplate you can find pretty much anywhere. If he had been found to have given specific advice to individuals about their particular legal issues, he would have been in deep shit, indeed, because that would have been unauthorized practice of the law. As it is, he’s just a sleazebag who’s pissed off at lawyers.
So there you have it, F-P, a person was sued and he won. The people in charge of deciding whether he was guilty or not more or less said straight out “If you give people advice about their particular legal problems on the internet, that’s practicing the law.”
One useful bit of legal advice I learned from this thread is to never take legal advice from someone who doesn’t know the difference between a licensed medical profession and an illegal sex worker. 
Someone having sexytime with his (or her! we live in enlightened times, after all) special lady is not prostitution. Well, unless the special lady is a whore. On behalf of my friends who do that sort of thing (sexytime with ladies, not hiring prostitutes), I rather resent the insinuation.
Also, some people incorporate massage into their sexytime, so I thought you might have some wisdom to share. I didn’t know you were going to get all Mordant Masseur Mofo on me just for asking a simple question.
I don’t know if anyone ever questioned that a non-lawyer offering specific legal advice over the internet is performing unauthorized practice of law. Certainly I didn’t.
My point was that this guy got sued because he had a website that promised people “free legal advice”, which naturally attracted attention from the authorities, since this is exactly what he was not allowed to do (and what he, in his defense, had to deny actually doing). (The fact that he was generally opposed to lawyers as a class probably didn’t help him either.) That’s not the same thing - in terms of likelihood of being sued, if not legally - as a guy who offers advice in a more informal setting, with a disclaimer.
Why do you confuse sexy time with prostitution? Is your sister number four prostitute in all of Kazakhstan?