Lawdiscuss.com - Stack Exchange site for legal advice | Hacker News Reader

Lawdiscuss.com - Stack Exchange site for legal advice

lawdiscuss.com

22 pointsnhashem22 comments

I am sure if they figure out a way to make the best answers and best advice givers float to the top, similar to the seeking alpha cred system it will become very useful. Information wants to be free and the law is free to access, but difficult to gain access to for the layman.

My concern is the legal profession makes it's bacon by keeping the law mysterious and vexing. Legalese is often needlessly complicated and obfuscates a contracts true intention. As long as lawyers and law students continue writing in Plain English this will be a great tool to cut through all the crap.

The nature of reality is the cause of the legal professions complexity. Legalese is simply a tool used in order to make the communication more precise and uniform (you could say the same thing about programming). Without legalese, you would undoubtedly see a dramatic rise in court filings (like in programming, you would see more bugs).

It's similar to programming in that you are attempting to draw up rules/parameters for a game, but more challenging because the system it operates in is usually less constrained.

Take this for what it's worth; I would call myself neither an expert in law or programming.

Hello HN, thank you for all the great comments! My name is Munish Dayal, I'm a newly admitted attorney in California and we started this site not long ago because we thought that most of the Legal Q&A sites weren't that great (a lot of them charge money). I briefly worked as a corporate lawyer at a firm in California that charges obscene rates but I wanted to say that I am personally going to try to make an effort to answer every question on the site that I can, especially for entrepreneurs bootstrapping their own startups that may not have resources to seek counsel, no matter how small. My passion is working with startups since I'm attempting to start my own so I am happy to at least try to answer any of your questions. I can't guarantee that it will always be a definitive answer but I hope it will at least help you.

I wanted to address a few concerns - I am building up a stable of attorneys, new and experienced to answer questions so the people answering your questions on our site aren't just a bunch of clueless law students. I know our design isn't that great (I'm not much of a designer) but we are going to work on it. George Grellas - you are right to point out that the quality will be variable and this will never replace a talented, experienced attorney (like yourself) that is necessary for startups seeking capital; I can't guarantee I will know something about every question, but we are shooting for it as a resource. I will keep checking this thread but thank you all for the support and I hope you will find this useful.

This might prove useful as a resource but I suspect it will be highly variable in the quality of advice one can glean from it (just a quick perusal: a good answer on what it means to do a trademark; a very superficial one on what form of entity one should set up for a small business; and no answer to the perennially vexing question, "Why are there so many lawyers?").

I also think that the open-ended format, permitting users to ask questions about any legal subject imaginable, will tend to limit the site's usefulness for specialized areas like startup advice.

They also need to give everyone a default "IANAL" badge, which they lose if they're photographed holding 1) a piece of paper saying "Hi, LawDiscuss.com, I'm $username!" and a legible law school diploma.

Except aren't there rules about lawyers giving advice to people who aren't their clients?

I think grellas can answer this better than I can. I imagine it's something like what happens with stocks: a broker can say "I like IBM. I think it's going up from here," but has to footnote it with "This is not advice, and is no substitute for your own research. Ask a financial advisor before etc."

There's a big difference between graduating from law school and being a licensed attorney. What they need is a way to verify a user's identity and cross-check that against bar members in that user's state, which is a matter of public record. Having a badge for the state(s) that user is licensed to practice law in would be useful information as well, as many issues of law differ state-to-state.

I'm sure this site will get a lot of feedback along the lines of "I don't know how useful this will be," but I could see this being very useful if it gets enough traction. Let's not forget that many programmers consult for hundreds of dollars an hour for over hundreds of different technologies and yet Stack Overflow is very successful. You also don't need to be a lawyer to suggest something, a simple "I had this issue once and this is what I did" anecdote could still be useful for the questioner.

Looks like it has some growing pains. Most of the links at the top jsut link back to the main page. Alot of people have the "Tumbleweed" badge - "Asked a questions with no answers, no comments, and low views for a week".

It's an interesting idea but I'm not sure how many lawyers who normally charge hundreds of dollars an hour to answer stuff like this will really decide they want to do it for free. I'd like to see it take off but I think it may have a tough time.

Lawyers sell expertise and judgment; this site lets them advertise both. I could imagine a highly specialized lawyer using it--for example, if you're really the go-to guy for dealing with Minnesota labor laws as they relate to commissioned salespeople, this site might be the only way you'd find your customers.

If they want to use this model, they could charge for advanced feed creation / filtering features, so they get an email every time someone asks about their exact niche (and is located in their area).

To say nothing of the fact that laws are radically different in each jurisdiction. A correct answer for Palo Alto would say nothing about a legal situation in Toronto.

While the site's term of use cover the "duty of care" stuff, I see a lot of potential pitfalls for lawyers using this site and not many benefits.

A correct answer for California says very little about a correct answer in Nevada, let alone in another country.

The law isn't quite the same as software development. Seems like the correct answer would often depend on a huge amount of context.

Something about the whole Stack Overflow/Exchange-type answer site look is very off-putting.

What is off-putting about it? Please elaborate as I've found SO very, very helpful. Specifically, these points have made the site so helpful:

- The badge system rewards good answers.

- The most popular questions and answers float to the top.

- The accepted answer gets floated to the top.

- Questions and answers can be edited by other users for clarification

- Community wikis provide invaluable information from users about certain topics that aren't question based

- The site is fast and responsive.

My only complaints are based on reviving topics. Old topics seem to be forgotten. But if you try to repost an old topic for some updated answers, the question is closed because of reposting.

kyro, what have you found to be very off-putting?

It's way too cluttered with bold colors and bold fonts. I'm always so overwhelmed and confused when I land on a site like that. All the information is in your face.

What do any of those points have to do with the look of the site?

I'm honestly surprised some sort of "Legal Overflow" site wasn't created earlier, so props to these guys for giving it a shot. Based on the responses it looks like they already have a few guys with a legal background prepared to answer questions as best as they can, so maybe that will provide the "seed users" they need to provide value. Whether those guys are experienced legal professionals or just some buddies in law school is up in the air though.

Others have been created before. One that I've personally tried is http://www.lawguru.com/ (absolutely no affiliation)

The first few sentences of each answer are disclaimers and add a lot of noise. Any way to push the disclaimers to the end of the answers?

Sure I will definitely implement that from now on,just felt it was important to point it out initially.

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