And, I should add, this is a complete red herring, because the board is placing the same limits on both lawyers and non-lawyers – don’t give specific legal advice on the boards.
"From the original thread:Quote:
Originally Posted by samclem
And we definitely don’t cotton to lay-people(read=amateurs) coming in and giving specific advice. We appreciate lay-people coming in and giving cites to sites which give rather factual information. But making black and white statements, and then qualifying them with "I am not a “lawyer/doctor/plumber” is just weasel verbiage. And it won’t be tolerated. “”
Italics mine.
There are some additional considerations that I have not seen discussed in this thread.
Asking for legal advice in a public forum is generally not against the law, but it is usually very foolish, and can lead to unexpected and unfortunate consequences – both for the ones asking and for the ones answering. The SDMB does not go far enough in discouraging it, IMO. When you are suing someone or thinking about suing someone, or especially if you are getting sued or worried about getting sued, the wisest course is seeking prompt and confidential advice from a qualified lawyer who practices in your jurisdiction. The lawyer will know the law, can render competent advice, and can do so under the protection of the attorney-client privilege.
Asking a general or hypothetical question about the law is fine, and seldom dangerous. But asking for particular advice about specific facts can be very dangerous. It can be dangerous for the member asking the question because, if the case does get litigated, the opposing party’s attorney will usually ask whom else (other than his or her attorney) the member has discussed the case with. The member must then disclose the SDMB thread, in which case a good opposing attorney can have a field day. Whatever the member said may reveal knowledge or strategy that the opposing attorney can use against the member in litigation – and no matter how harmless the comments may seem on the boards, a good attorney will use them in litigation in whatever way helps his or her client’s case. The member will presumably have read the thread that he or she started, and will thus be burdened with notice of every wild-ass guess or theory posted in the thread, so that the opposing attorney can inquire into why the member did or did not act in accordance with the suggestion once it was posted. If some answering post suggests the legally correct course, and the asking member did not immediately adopt it, then a court can easily infer that the member was acting with reckless or willful disregard for the law from that point forward. Even if the information posted on the board was not inherently harmful, the mere act of posting it in a public forum probably waives any claim of confidentiality that the member may otherwise have enjoyed, and may even void the attorney-client privilege with respect to any subject in the litigation that was the subject of the public disclosure. The opposing attorney can then invade even otherwise privileged conversations between the member and his or her attorney.
Answering a question asking for particular legal advice about a specific case can also be dangerous. If the member answering the question ventures a guess about the law, but is not a lawyer, then he or she may be practicing law without a license – a crime in most jurisdictions. And while prosecutors and bar associations are probably not scouring the SDMB looking for potential defendants, a disgruntled opponent who learns about the thread can wreak havoc for the SDMB and for the Chicago Reader, Inc., by simply bringing it to the attention of a prosecutor – because even if no prosecution results, an investigation will. I am surprised that it hasn’t happened yet (assuming that it hasn’t).
If the member answering the question is a lawyer, but is not licensed in the member’s jurisdiction, then he or she may still be practicing law without a license – in which case a prosecution is much more likely if the opposing party instigates a complaint, since a lawyer ought to know better. And if the lawyer is properly licensed in the member’s jurisdiction, then simply answering the question may establish an attorney-client relationship – hence the disclaimers that so many lawyers post in their answers that “I am not your lawyer and you are not my client” as a result of posting an answer. Whether such a disclaimer is effective is debatable: some jurisdictions are extremely liberal about finding an attorney-client relationship from even casual communication between an attorney and someone seeking legal advice. And if an attorney-client relationship is established, then rendering legal advice in a public forum – thereby waiving the attorney-client privilege – is almost certainly malpractice.
There is a significant downside risk for everyone who asks or answers a question asking for legal advice about an identifiable case.
Much snippage
I agree entirely. Either it’s general, trivial or hypothetical- in which case all Posters can answer (but caveat emptor) or it’s specific and non-trivial, in which case the thread should be closed, and the OP asked to not do that again. If it is serious enough that only “experts” should answer, then it’s too serious for these boards.
And I think you’re using this minor aspect of the entire discussion to derail the main point.
Perhaps Samclem will speak for himself on this point, but from my point of view the language here mentioned an amateur because it was an amateur who was the problem.
Note that Samclem never says “It’s okay if experts give specific advice to posters on their legal problems.”
“Reasonable” being the operative word, which is why you’re not going to convince DrDeth. Hell, he’s fighting bravely against his strawman claim that only experts will be allowed to answer questions.
You might not want to waste your time here.
And what field are you claiming to have expertise in?
You have missed the boat so badly that you can’t even see the boat anymore. To you, the boat is a dot.
Option A:
Bricker sez: It’s unquestionably the starter. 100% chance. There’s no other possibility. Trust me – starter, starter, starter.
Option B:
Bricker sez: It might be the starter, but I’m no auto mechanic.
I would be perfectly happy to have a mod warn me for posting Option A. I believe Option B should pass without comment from the mods.
Do you ken the difference between Option A and Option B?
Jodi, I’m not a lawyer (even on TV) yet I’m pretty sure that if you check the SEC’s PCAOB pronouncements as well as Sarbanes-Oxley (2004-2006), you’ll find more than enough cites (Federal ammunition) about who can and can’t perform services to not only rebut Fear’s original ‘any job, any where’ bollocks, but to also pretty much refute the above quote by the Dutchman.
Unless Dutchman back-pedals furiously, stating ‘But having The Living Shit fined out of you personally as well as your new employer by a Federal Agency isn’t technically being prevented from accepting a job…’ 
Keep up the good work, Jodi…!
That is not practicable.
I suggest that if it waddles like a duck and quacks like a duck, then it probably is a duck, and for the purposes of a general anonymous message board, obtaining a veternary certificate would be silly.
A question for the ducks out there – how often does a judge ask you to prove that you are a lawyer when you address the court? I have never been asked.
Wasn’t there a poster impersonating a lawyer at some point? I think Bricker called him out. Beryl Mooncow or something.
If anyone feels a poster is making up the fact that he/she is a lawyer (there seem to be a glut of them around here), they can easily write in to the mods. I’d have no problem telling one of them which state I’m licensed in (not California)-but I don’t see why we have to reveal it to the board at large.
Never; most judges around here act on the “nobody would be that stupid” premise. You do hear occassionally about a judge asking for a lawyer’s bar card number when the “lawyer” starts saying enough stupid shit to make them suspicious. “My bar card number? Uh…four.”
A classic thread. Enjoy.
Never. When I was practicing, there were times I was asked for a bar card when visiting local jails outside of my usual haunts (most of the deputies in my local area knew me by sight). Even that was uncommon, though. And I have never stepped up beside a defendant and announced my appearance only to have the judge say, “What’s your bar number, Mr. Bricker? If you ARE a lawyer, that is!”
But an imposter would quickly become apparent. (As would a rookie’s first appearance in front of the court, for different reasons.)
Let me toss out there another possible issue behind non-competes.
While my lawyers have uniformly agreed that such are difficult to enforce it is NOT difficult to fuck someone over with one. The amount of money breaking one can require can be, from my direct experience, in six figures.
Explain something to me.
How does one refute a question ?
How does one backpedal from a question ?
Since there is a question about my post as a MODERATOR in that original thread, let me quote it in full, give the context, and parse it(is that the right term?)
I don’t want to end questions about legal/medical matters. They are part of life. I WILL shut down threads that ask incredibly specific questions about those kinds of matters, IF they, at my descretion, present a potential problem for the board or the poster.
Let me be specific about what happened in that original thread. Nutty Bunny opened that thread at 8:53 AM EDT. I was at work at that point. Four minutes later, Fear Itself makes one of the most irresponsible responses to a General Questions legal question that I’ve ever seen. “You have the right to accept any job, anywhere, any time. Tell her she can avoid the whole problem by paying you 10k more per year.” If I had been at home at that point, and noticed that, I may have chosen to shut it down, I may have simply warned FI to not offer personal opinions about legal matters. But I wasn’t at home.
At 9:10 AM, Jodi, whom I recognize as a real-life lawyer, offers what I consider to be very lawyerly advice, very mildly chiding FI, but in effect agreeing with him except to add the very important legal disclaimer "An employee may work under a contract or a known office policy that prohibits him or her from going directly to a competitor or a client, precisely to prevent this kind of poaching. BUNNY, if you didn’t sign that kind of contract or work with that kind of policy, they probably will not be able to prevent you from taking another job that is more financially advantageous to you. "
Notice the difference in responses? I did.
Then, at 9:17 AM, our resident NON-lawyer, FI, as a response to Jodi comes back with “In most states, these kinds of employment policies or contracts are held to unenforceable in a court of law. I know; I signed one in California, then had an attorney look at it when I was offered another position. Unenforceable, even if you signed a contract.”
Another black and white statement by a NON-lawyer. And one that is basically worthless, unless one knows the location/situation/etc. of the OP. Which I don’t think anyone did at that point.
I got home about 7:30 that night, read all of my emails, started reading the boards, I’m not sure when I first saw that thread and decided to do something about it, but I posted to it at 10:19. It wasn’t a life or death matter, but it had 59 posts at that point, most of the posts trying to convince FI that he had made a mistake in his actions. Sure seemed to me like he did. So I posted.
Bottom line–Don’t make black and white statements to a legal/medical thread in General Questions, especially if you are not a lawyer/doctor. Notice that all the lawyers in that thread give qualified responses. Not so, our NON-lawyer.
As to what I’ll do when Bricker starts pulling mechanical advice out of his ass, perhaps I’ll leave it to another Mod. 
It’s interesting, you know. Lawyers give qualified responses because we understand that while the law is what it is, our task is to analogize or distinguish the facts of our case from the others out there. It’s very Sesame Street – we play a lot of “one of these things is not like the others.” Me personally, I don’t give a rip if you claim to be an attorney or not when you respond to legal threads. What chaps my hide is precisely what Fear Itself did: make a wild guess, which s/he then tried to back up with anecdotal “evidence.” I didn’t post in that thread, because I find it so tiresome, but from a legal perspective, what Fear Itself assumed was that California law regarding non-competes is the same as every other state.
In reality, however, California has a statutory prohibition on non-competes, and its law is diametrically opposed to pretty much every other state’s on the issue. So you have someone who hasn’t actually looked at the law but has instead made some assumptions posting with authority.
Then the “SDMB Bar Association” gets lambasted because, to a (wo)man, we found Fear Itself’s response to be irresponsible and unsupportable.
I think the real problem is that people hear lawyers give qualified answers and assume as a consequence that the law isn’t certain. That’s not really true for the most part; the law is certain, but its application to specific facts can be less certain because usually there are a number of facts we simply don’t have or don’t know.
Anyway, samclem, I for one appreciate your vigilance regarding the legal threads. I don’t find you too heavy handed (sometimes not heavy handed enough ).
[QUOTE=The Flying Dutchman]
Jodi, I remember you way back as a girl who was fixated on the glans of a penis. i thought then your imagination got the better of you.
I don’t generally air my penile fixations, such as they are, on the Boards, but you remember me however you like.
A bookkeeper specifically? Not off the top of my head, so not without doing more legal research than I can justify doing. The point – which you seem to have missed – is that at the time FEAR ITSELF twice posted his indefensibly overbroad advice, he didn’t know she was a bookkeeper, so his advice was not supportable by the facts then known. Even now, even if I don’t have the inclination to exhaustively research New York law (and New York is not a jurisidiction in which I am licenses or have ever practiced), we still don’t know whether NUTTY BUNNY is looking at a legal issue or not. We do know, however, that “you have the right to take any job, anywhere, anytime” is not correct as a generalization (being totally dependent on what you do, where, and for whom), and may not be correct in this specific case.
Again, the point was not whether FI was ultimately right or ultimately wrong; the point was and is that when he was pontificating as if he knew what he was talking about, he couldn’t possibly have known what he was talking about.
I do not advocate that only lawyers should give legal opinions in threads that ask about law. I know there are many knowledgeable laypeople who are interested in the law, capable of research, and motivated by personal interest to look at and answer questions “the lawyers” may not have the time or inclination to look at. I also think as a general rule, you get what you pays for in the “free advice” area, and only a fool would take medical or legal advice from a Message Board.
That all being said, this is a forum dedicated to fighting ignorance, and people do post with the hope that the opinions and advice they get will be helpful and correct. So if any of us see anyone pulling advice straight out of their ass, I think we should call that person on it. IMO, at the end of the day, it doesn’t have as much to do with the law specifically as it does with not allowing people who don’t know what they’re talking about to post as if they do. And by “allow,” I don’t mean there is some official sanction or extra moderating going on; I mean if you post crap, you should expect other people to take strong exception.
http://www.leginfo.ca.gov/cgi-bin/waisgate?WAISdocID=6431251519+1+0+0&WAISaction=retrieve
"6002.1. (a) A member of the State Bar shall maintain all of the
following on the official membership records of the State Bar:
(1) The member’s current office address and telephone number or,
if no office is maintained, the address to be used for State Bar
purposes or purposes of the agency charged with attorney discipline.
(2) All specialties in which the member is certified.
(3) Any other jurisdictions in which the member is admitted and
the dates of his or her admission.
(4) The jurisdiction, and the nature and date of any discipline
imposed by another jurisdiction, including the terms and conditions
of any probation imposed, and, if suspended or disbarred in another
jurisdiction, the date of any reinstatement in that jurisdiction.
(5) Such other information as may be required by agreement with or
by conditions of probation imposed by the agency charged with
attorney discipline.
A member shall notify the membership records office of the State
Bar of any change in the information required by paragraphs (1), (4),
and (5) within 30 days of any change and of any change in the
information required by paragraphs (2) and (3) on or before the first
day of February of each year."
Thus, whether or not you are a Lawyer (at least in CA) is easily checked, and is on Record.
I now have a headache after reading that entire thread, but I’ve also gained a great deal of respect for Jodi and Bricker from their behavior therein, so it wasn’t a complete loss. 