Yep. I explained to her in that thread as well off board how the standard way of doing that was. I even checked with an attorney friend of mine to verify the information. She thought that her way was more fair, and arguably it is, so therefore refused to believe against all reason that she could be incorrect.
And for the record, I’m sorry i snapped at DiosaB earlier. I thought … well, suffice to say I thought that there would be a different reaction here by Stoid
This pretty much sums the whole thing up.
No worries, I didn’t take it personally. I know that you’re good people 
Would that hypothesis have been supported by anything in the records to date? 
I often tell people that they really should be reasonable about things and try to work it out without resorting to litigation. The court’s solution to a problem usually doesn’t please everyone and often involves pleases no one. That being said, most judges I’ve ever dealt with are pretty fair and level headed so they aren’t going to try to screw a party for no reason.
I guess you were referring to a post by Stoid where she posted some language that is inappropriate for this forum or even any forum. I don’t condone it, but I have to say I understand her reaction. Using someone’s posts at the board to research real life information, and then posting some of your findings at the board without that poster’s consent, is really unacceptable behaviour in my view.
No, I’m pretty sure that’s not the case.
Muffin was quoting Stoid’s OP in The Pit, posted in April of last year, in which Stoid inveighs against the various attorneys who fail to comprehend her distinction between legal advice and legal information, and by refusing to gove her free advice are also refusing her free legal information, which she believed she was due.
That OP happened well before anyone posted any IRL information about Stoid, and her words would have been extraordinarily prescient to be in reaction to this.
Ah, OK, I thought he was referring to some post by Stoid in this thread that was removed by a moderator. My mistake.
I still stand by my other point - using board postings to do detective work and post IRL information about another poster is pretty obnoxious.
I agree that it’s creepy, but in a post in this thread, she posted the tag line of their porn website they run. I was kind of curious about it based on the subject matter, so I Googled the phrase she posted. Not only did the website come up, but so did a bunch of articles with her full name and contact info. While I certainly wouldn’t go searching out court docs or anything, she didn’t go too far to maintain her anonymity-- particularly if a big dummy like me could find all that info on her, all just be looking up her website.
Ok I don’t visit as much any more but I have been following this saga off and on. I gather that some posts were deleted for good reason. But it made this very hard to follow at an important turning point. Maybe a note at the time from the mod that deleted the posts?
The level of difficulty involved in gathering the information is irrelevant. It’s still wrong.
I don’t think that’s it. Some posters self-edited their own posts, and a moderator removed a link that would lead you to personal information about a poster, with an explanation of that fact.
Got it. The quote that came from another thread confused me along with those commenting on what was in the link.
Correct.
This. Had she won her appeal, her victory thread in the Pit would’ve made all her previous “I’m so much smarter than all you college educated lawyers” threads look tame by comparison.
I don’t have time to look through the old Pit thread just now, but I remember supporting Stoid in her disagreement with the attorneys about their arrogance, while saying the validity of her case and her decision to fight it out will be determined by the outcome.
In that context, it looks striking to me that - as has been noted by another poster here - the previously reticent lawyers, who stood shoulder to shoulder in declaring in no uncertain terms that they could not under any circumstances offer her any legal analysis - or even sources - because she was not their client and no amount of disclaimers would help, have suddenly returned to their usual stances as fonts of legal knowledge and analysis.
OTOH, it’s hard to avoid noticing that Stoid’s case has apparently foundered in just the manner predicted by the lawyers, that her arguments were not necessarily wrong so much as misdirected, her focus was wrong, and her knowledge of legal procedure (vs. law itself) was lacking. Even if Stoid was right that the appeals court judges should have looked at things the way she did, it was apparently predictable - to those with experience - that they wouldn’t. Which is ultimately what counts.
So the bottom line, as I see it, is that we can learn two lessons from the episode.
- Lawyers can get pretty arrogant if you question the need for their unique expertise
- They just might be right.
I think (1) is more accurately stated as “lawyers can get pretty arrogant if you try to make them work for free”.
Stoid didn’t question the need for their legal expertise- that’s why she kept asking for “legal advice” or “legal information” (depending on who you listened to). She questioned the need for it to be provided within the context of an attorney/client relationship.
Other people have made this point in this thread, but it’s wrong. Everyone who asks about anything on this MB is asking for free information, or to “work for free”. But no one is forced to answer anything. Anyone who doesn’t want to “work for free” - in answering legal questions or questions about anything else - is free to ignore the question. Or - if they feel they need to explain themselves for whatever reason - they can say they don’t want to work for free.
But that’s not what was said then. As above, people claimed over and over again that they had ethical issues with answering the questions.
Her position was that if she got the answer to a few questions she was focused on she could pretty much handle the case on her own (especially since she couldn’t afford a lawyer anyway). This is what got people’s dander up.
Because it wasn’t true.
And if someone undertook to answer those questions for her, and she relied on that advice, and then lost her claim, she might well have started looking around for someone to sue.
Because she was RIGHT. And if she didn’t win, that obviously meant that someone was at fault for her loss, someone other than her.
Would such a suit have any merit? No, of course not.
Would the prudent course be to avoid even the chance of getting involved in such a debacle?
Yes.
She was trying to get free research. Not just general knowledge or info, but specific (and very arcane) case cites. Case cites that she refused to believe were off point and would not help her anyway.
One of the issues that kept coming up in that pair of threads last year was the potential for lawyers to be sued for on-line advice. Some posters expressed doubts that anyone would ever be sued for online comments and that it was a flimsy excuse put forward by arrogant lawyers to justify not helping Stoid.
Except there’s now a nasty little spat in the courts in Canada on exactly this issue: whether some lawyers who are alleged to have criticised the legal opinions expressed by other lawyers on-line have defamed those other lawyers. It’s still before the courts and in the early stages, so no idea who’s right and how it will play out. But for me, it highlights the need for caution about expressing legal opinions on-line.
I started a thread about it, with links to the news-articles, but it seems to have drifted out of sight pretty quickly: Canadian Lawyers Facing Lawsuit over Online Postings on Legal Issues.