Wow. I just want to say that brianmelendez’s posts are well thought out, lucid, and hard very hard to disagree with. What an intelligent poster. Impressive.
Why, thank you, samarm. You are obviously an astute observer with exceptional discernment and perception yourself! 
:eek:
I’m screwed! I’ll never reach 10k now. 
So, you two are socks of each other, then?
Man, Coldfire is going to be pissed when he gets back from vacation.
Somebody please pit Cajun Man or TVeblen and spread this crap out a little bit.
Ok posters don’t have to start threads about everything but if they do it does have to be a pit thread. Mod.s are always telling posters to go to the pit if they want to say something about the Admin of the board the front page says
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I’m not talking about this OP at all really but I do get a feeling that maybe you should change the front page and advise that is given out. Take it to e-mail looks like it’s the preferred option of the Mods. Make it official and you’ll have less people hassling you with stupid threads started by people following the rules and advise that this site has written down.
I thought you were referring to more academic questions.
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Sure, and I don’t see a problem with someone asking a question on a public message board about a serious medical condition. Hopefully, the response will be ‘see a doctor, pronto.’
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That’s a different problem. And the solution (IMHO) is for lawyers to call bullshit.
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Gah. Please note I used the word “sensitive” for a reason.
Anyway, what exactly is your position? Are you saying that questions asking for legal advice don’t belong anywhere on the SDMB?
But legal advice is different from medical advice, in that disclosing in a public forum the factual information necessary in order to ask the question may reveal knowledge or strategy that the opposing attorney can use against the member in litigation, may waive any claim of confidentiality that the member may otherwise have enjoyed, and may even void the attorney-client privilege. That risk is not present (at least not to the same extent) in a question seeking medical advice. By the time someone says, “See a lawyer, pronto,” the damage is already done.
Easier said than done. A lawyer ought to be very reluctant about getting involved in volunteering legal advice in an online forum, and even a simple answer whose purpose is “to call bullshit” may amount to such advice. If some know-it-all nonlawyer has given specific but incorrect legal advice, then a lawyer cannot easily correct the misinformation without also giving specific legal advice, which runs the very risks that I was pointing out.
What I wrote before: “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. . . . 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.”
To put it another way: The SDMB is a great forum for asking (or debating) general or even hypothetical questions seeking factual information about what the law says, where it came from, what it means, and how it works in practice. It is a bad place for asking questions seeking legal advice about particular cases. For actual legal advice, the wisest course is seeking prompt and confidential advice from a qualified lawyer who practices in your jurisdiction.
Perhaps, but there is a danger of revealing damaging information in all kinds of contexts besides that of legal advice. And in the vast majority of cases, nobody is gonna bother looking up threads on the straight dope message board.
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Again, I think you’re being overly paranoid. Let me ask you this: Do you think that the advice I gave at the start of the thread was dangerous, improper, or whatever?
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Ok, so you aren’t advocating any particular policy for the moderation of this board, right?
We have begun going 'round in circles here. But:
I covered this issue in my first post in this thread. A good, thorough lawyer can easily discover and take advantage of it. I have frequently discovered and used an opposing party’s electronic mail.
My only comment on the question from agent little (the OP in the original thread in GQ that prompted this thread in the Pit), or on your remarks about that question in this thread, is that agent little ought to consult a qualified lawyer who practices in his or her jurisdiction.
I refer you to the first paragraph in my first post in this thread.
I note that electronic mail is not the same thing as a SDMB thread. I gather you concede the possibility of somebody discovering and using a SDMB thread against a party is remote. If you think it outweighs any potential benefits of asking for advice, then I can’t really argue with you, but your values strike me as somewhat paranoid.
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Look, do you or do you not believe that my advice in this thread has any realistic possibility of leading to “unexpected and unfortunate consequences” for me?
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Ok, so I gather you aren’t advocating any particular moderation policy. So it’s worth pointing out that your post is irrelevant to my original point, that the GQ thread should not have been closed.
Of course electronic mail is not the same as a thread on a message board, but you’re missing my point: if the message-board thread was out there in the cases that I mentioned, then I would have found it. I do not “concede the possibility of somebody discovering and using a SDMB thread against a party is remote”: what I actually wrote was, “A good, thorough lawyer can easily discover and take advantage of it.” I don’t know how you went from “easily” (my word) to “remote” (your word), so please stop trying to play the ventriloquist.
You may think what you like about my “values,” but being risk-averse hardly amounts to paranoia. I also wear my seat belt when I drive, stop for red lights and stop signs, buy insurance, double-check my facts before presenting them to the court, and explore all the salient downside risks–even the remote ones–when I am advising my clients. Those practices just make good sense from a cost-benefit analysis: for minimal cost, you can avoid a potential disaster. And they are no more “paranoid” than steering clear of asking for or giving legal advice in a public forum.
The question that you actually asked was, “Do you think that the advice I gave at the start of the thread was dangerous, improper, or whatever?” You weren’t listening. You were asking for my opinion as a professional on the content of your publicly volunteered advice about agent little’s legal problem. My point stands: if agent little wants legal advice, then agent little ought to consult a qualified lawyer who practices in his or her jurisdiction. If you want legal advice, then so should you.
But now you have shifted your question: “do you or do you not believe that my advice in this thread has any realistic possibility of leading to ‘unexpected and unfortunate consequences’ for me?” Okay, since I have already covered this ground once, I’ll bite. As I wrote, “the likelihood of the worst-case scenarios is remote. But like any risky behavior where the risk is slim but real, eventually the odds turn against you. My views are based on experience . . . and every scenario that I mentioned was based on my (admittedly not necessarily perfect) recollection of some actual case.” I don’t know what you mean by “realistic,” but I doubt that there is any significant likelihood that your advice in this thread will lead to “unexpected and unfortunate consequences” in this particular case. (By the way, in case you missed it, that last sentence is a perfect candidate to be taken out of context in a future post. But read on.) Just like not wearing your seatbelt does not result in any significant likelihood that you will get injured in an accident on any given trip: an accident probably won’t happen at all and, even if one does, not wearing your seatbelt may not make a difference. But not wearing your seatbelt sure increases the odds of injury and, statistically, is less safe than wearing one. You may make it through an entire career at the SDMB posting answers to questions asking for legal advice without negative consequences. But a lot of questions get posted here asking for legal advice, and–like I wrote before–eventually somebody will shoot an eye out, and then we’ll all be sorry.
Again, you are disregarding what I actually wrote, and instead arguing against a straw man. In response to your question, “so you aren’t advocating any particular policy for the moderation of this board, right?,” I referred you to the first paragraph in my first post in this thread. Since you evidently ignored it, let me spell it out:
My post was responding directly to your comment, “Traditionally, people have asked for legal advice in the GQ forum, and I don’t see anything wrong with that.” Which is why I quoted you in my post explicitly disagreeing with your comment. Then I wrote, “The SDMB does not go far enough in discouraging it, IMO. . . . manhattan may have just saved agent little and everyone else from a bigger headache than they realize.” Are you really missing the connection to your OP? and to “administration of the SDMB”?
If you still don’t get it, then I doubt that I can explain it to you.
Gah. I assumed that because you dodged my point, you basically agreed with it.
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Do you check your facts 3 times? 10 times? 50 times? At a certain point the costs of caution outweigh the benefits. Everyone’s entitled to make their own assessment. IMHO, your risk aversion is a little on the high side.
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No I wasn’t, I was asking for your specific opinion as someone who was making a general statement about an issue.
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Honestly, I think you’re splitting hairs here - I don’t see much of a difference.
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Do you cross streets? Do you ride in an airplane? Do you have sex with other people ever? Everything entails risk.
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Sure, and the issue was whether the question belonged in GQ or some other forum. Not whether the question should never be asked in any forum.
A simple “objection over-ruled” would have sufficed.
By the way, I opened up a thread in large part because I thought that the original GQ question was worth discussing. (Honestly, I also felt the need to criticize the decision to close the thread.)
In hindsight, I should have checked IMHO to see if the question was being discussed there, which I gather is what happened.
And if the mods deem it inappropriate to complain in the Pit about the closing of threads, please let me know and I will never start this sort of thread again.
Given that it’s sort-of happened at least twice on the SDMB that I know of…
I’m not discussing the first case, having no desire to reopen old wound, other than to say “Do a search on Melin”.
The second was the infinitely stupid “Poster A/Poster B” thing wherein we lost the right to misquote people for humorous or dramatic effect.
(In brief, one poster, a known doofus, was upset that another poster (a known non-doofus) had changed the doofus’s text in quote box. The context was "Let’s see is what you said is racist if I quote what you say, but I change “southerner” (or something…it wasn’t southerner) to black (or something…it wasn’t black). The first poster, the doofus, decided to have appoplexy and threatened to sue the board and the other poster.
So it now only can, but has happened.
Fenris, wondering if he’ll be sued by the doofus for using the term “doofus”
It seems to me you’re talking about an entirely different situation - where a posting here is the subject matter of possible litigation.
That’s different from the situation that brianmelendez described, where a poster asks for legal advice and the post is used against him or her in ongoing or subsequent legal proceedings.
Based on the situation you described, the advice might be “don’t misquote anyone” NOT “don’t ask for legal advice here”