I heard a CCO complaining that non-legal people should not have access to any contracts. Her claim was that they would read those contracts and think they understand them, while in fact they won't. She considered this a too great risk because only legal people could truly understand them.
She'll love this piece.
Think about this: If I give you the simplest piece of advice in legal matters, I'm heavily encouraged to declare I'm not a lawyer and that you should contact one.
This is the only profession where I see this be so reliably the case. In other risk-averse professions (tax compliance, health) there is always the obvious "You should talk to a professional" but even in health it's not as heavy-handed. I've never seen a doctor say "I'm a doctor but this is not medical advice" when giving basic information.
And I understand the superficial reasons why this is done, but there's just as many reasons not to get your buddy-mechanic to fix your car without them making you sign waivers.
This matters because the people who most need legal advice are those who can't afford lawyers. Makes me very uneasy.
Also to your CCO, I would say that if we were limited to what we would understand day-to-day, there would be no more learning. This is one of the core pillars of free software after all.
Or maybe alternatively, those laws do exist for other professions, but other professions are not as risk averse about being sued over them. For example, I'm pretty sure that practicing medicine without a license is just as illegal, but I've never heard a doctor worry about saying "this is not medical advice".
Lawyers do that because enforceable lawyer-client relationships can be created based just on a conversation, and whether there is one or not turns on whether the non-lawyer thought there was one. The creation of a lawyer-client relationship, in turn, has knock-on effects. A lawyer can be sued for malpractice based on that verbal advice, can be disqualified from taking a case adverse to the “client,” etc. Also, state bars are extremely humorless about unlicensed out-of-state practice. Just the appearance of giving legal advice in a state where you aren’t licensed can get you in trouble.
And, the duties and responsibilities of a lawyer to their client are different than for doctors.
They could be made the same but that would require new/more laws.
Just offering general statements about the law, or hypotheticals, like we're doing, on this board, isn't enough.
Is this really done to protect the public (as opposed to because state bars want to try to protect lawyers as the only people qualified to talk about the law)? I have my doubts, but I'd like to stay employed.
[1] Look at this example I found in 20 seconds of googling to see how talking about legal issues in a public forum can lead to a headache for lawyers: https://www.nvbar.org/wp-content/uploads/opinion_32.pdf. It looks like sanity ultimately prevailed (you don't form an attorney-client relationship by calling into a radio station), but I'm sure whichever lawyer did this spent years dealing with potentially having their career ended while this moved through the California State Bar's system.
A large part of what people say on the Internet is confident and wrong. For any hot topic, people will pretend to be experts after reading a news article or two. It's not uncommon to have debates where nobody in the conversation has any relevant experience.
If people were more realistic about what they know about the world, I think conversation would be a lot more realistic and less heated. (Yes, this is very unlikely.)
It's not just a matter of "only lawyers can understand this area". Because, given exposure to the same matters, the same laws, regulators, etc., lay business people can become just as expert in legal analysis. They should still hire an attorney, of course, just as a NBA star still has a coach, the Pope a confessor, etc. etc.
And what are those duties, and how they are enforced?
It is nice that there are bars, but do they make any difference?
But just saying it's off the record and billing out as legal research instead of practicing law doesn't protect you.
If it's of any importance, a lawyer should be more than willing to provide their client with their advice in writing.
This isn't much different from how one shouldn't perform high-stakes transactions without the certainty of a written contract.
- It is illegal to bestow legal advice without being a lawyer.
- A lawyer who provides legal advice without a pre-existing relationship could be seen by the court as now acting and thus becoming a person’s lawyer, unwillingly.
The former case is silly and nobody is going to be checking the bar membership of same rando on the internet. The latter case is a legit worry among lawyers.
This is a lie. It's perfectly fine to provide legal advice without being a lawyer. What's not fine is to offer legal advice under the guise of being a lawyer or legal professional.
For example, filling out a form in a bank, or an HR form, or a health insurance form--those are all legal documents. But the bank agent, or the HR agent, or the health insurance rep can all tell you what parts need to be filled out and how, without fear of going to jail. Why? It's not because we've excepted them from some mythical law about providing legal advice. It's because they're not claiming to be lawyers.
I would readily consider self-studying for the bar considering I'm interested in the material and it would be extremely useful, but I have a full-time job and don't want to pay money to an online school just to be able to take a test. It doesn't help that there are almost no good free online materials for learning law, although you can of course just look at / ask about good college curriculums (curricula?) and acquire the materials yourself
I would be surprised that a lawyer would tell you this, because I've never met a lawyer who would. I have met plenty of non-lawyers who think that this is a thing, and in fact on HN, every person who spreads this information is a non-lawyer.
In a nutshell, it boils down to attempts by various state bars a few years ago to treat NOLO and AVVO and other websites as offering legal advice without a law license. But the bars lost almost all of those court cases...because it's okay for people to offer legal advice if they're not a lawyer, the same way it's okay for people to offering medical advice despite not being a doctor.
What's not okay is claiming to be a lawyer or legal professional if you're not one, but offering that as the reason your advice should be trusted. If you make no claim to be a lawyer or legal professional, it's not reasonable for someone to rely on your advice. Of course, they could sue you--but they could sue you whether or not you disclaimed being a lawyer, and either way the case would come down to whether it was reasonable for them to rely on your advice without hiring a lawyer of their own.
Also the laws around lawyers & doctors are different whereas most other professions do not have similar laws. Not surprising these professions all deal with similar situations differently then.
So the issue is more than the law texts and contracts are too complicated for us to understand despite the fact we are living by them.
You can't have a lawyer behind each decision of your life. But if you want to live a legal life, right now you need to. It's insane and not be sustainable for a democracy.
And no law journals, no need of knowledge of precedents. In fact, why even have lawyers?
I might agree that I could read the words in laws and think I understand them, but I disagree that 'the law' is that simple.
Law is like javascript, except every other word needs the same context and explanation that "this" requires.
For example, many reasonable people disagree on whether the second amendment's wording is intended to mean that _everyone_ should be able to bear arms, or whether it's intended to mean _only people in a militia_, and there also seems to be some disagreement on what "arms" means. I can see how a reasonable person could interpret it in either way. Such disagreement seems to have been something which the founders themselves shared.
tl;dr: People disagree both on what we currently interpret words in law to mean, as well as on what the _intent_ was when it was originally written.
And yet, yes, I'll argue that dev, in any language, is complicated.
Hell, there is a good part of the population that will consider assembling an ikea desk complicated. Let's not forget we are in the HN bubble here.
People are fallible. Just because something is simple and known doesn't mean that there won't be mistakes.
Statisticly people representing themself in court have very little chance to win a case.
The sheer amount of data you need to assimilate to just have an idea of what you need to do makes dealing with law a complex matter. Add this complexity to jargon, social and political dynamics and of course, experience, and you have a very complicated problem.
The law is not just an isolated set of words of paper. It's an intricate piece of a several systems.
But you don't need to go this far to prove my point. Take any recent bill, and make your grandma read it, then write a summary of it. She votes, but can she understand it ?
Case law, is the only thing that matters.
It's a very protective industry - you go through a lot of very expensive and time-consuming training and selection to get to be a certified lawyer, everyone in the industry has a heavily vested interest in making sure that there's a lot of valuable work that only certified lawyers can do.
No wonder, then, that they're resistant to automation - if you can bill $300 an hour for braindead work you can hand off to interns and just get checked by a lawyer before it goes out, why would they want to kill that cash cow?
The trouble is that quite apart from the rent-seeking cartel behaviour, it skews our entire legal system to much better serve those who can afford to pay for lawyers.
Perhaps the government ought to be supporting legal automation services.
The US government should be supporting legal aid for civil matters. From watching the boob tube civil matter legal aid is a thing in old Blighty. Pity we didn't adopt that along with the common law. But w/r/t govt funding in the US it can barely finance public defenders (to which there is a right, if I read Gideon correctly) and anyway, it's every man for himself. That's the American way.
No, absolutely not. You get legal aid if you're being prosecuted for a crime. You get legal aid if the state is trying to remove your children (but only at the point where they've served the notice and gone to court). You might get legal aid in family court (for divorce or child contact arrangements) if your spouse was abusive. You might get legal aid in court of protection. But for most civil law there is no legal aid available: you use the small claims track or you pay for lawyers.
Hourly billing rates of $300/hr make law a juicy target for technical disruption.
They would habitually take 5 minutes to explain something in a hard to understand way that could be explained in 30 seconds clearly with zero loss of information.
It reminded me of the software engineers I've worked with who manufactured job security with dizzying levels of technical debt.
Generally, I find non-lawyers are often lazy, sloppy, or indefinite when speaking or writing. When I was a software engineer I didn't notice it, now I see or hear sloppy/lazy language everywhere and it bugs the crap out of me.
If you don't believe edge cases matter, just ask Cleveland how it feels about losing the (original) Browns...
The problem isn't that people don't understand things. The problem is that they think they understand them only to find out that a ton of key words they thought they understood are actually pointers to specific legal concepts (which themselves may have pointers and so on) within the niche area of law the contract covers and they are blindsided by this to their detriment when there is a disagreement over whether the terms are satisfied.
This is particularly insidious (because of the preexisting power imbalance) when the legal matter is not contracts but state and local civil code and ordinance. People think they're complying with the law but they're really not and it gives the government power of arbitrary enforcement (which leads to abuse and corruption).
Sometimes complicated systems are complicated. It’s true that lawyers can have a knack for overthinking things sometimes but fundamentally these concepts are difficult and people’s rights and responsibilities and obligations and agreements overlap in complicated ways that often just don’t lend themselves to anything but sophisticated analysis.
2. They (along with lawyers like judges and legislators) create a guild with its own language which has the side-effect of empowering knowing lawyers over a reasonably literate layman
3. The public is now required to "ask a lawyer before doing anything" for "their safety"
See here: https://www2.nycbar.org/pdf/report/uploads/20072450-Rolesfor...
A friend did a non-lawyer "quick and easy" divorce -- mistakes were made. 10 years later he almost lost a house because his ex declared personal bankruptcy. It took some fancy lawyering for me to save it for him.
I did it gratis, but the same effort would have cost him ~$20K or more if he had to hire an attorney. Well, really, in his case, it would have been too late since he didn't even think it was an issue until he mentioned to me in passing on the last day before defaulting on the complaint.
Various intern and entry-level positions in legal are notoriously low paid and involve many sacrifices. One starts to earn money allowing to sustain oneself maybe in mid-30s? If one survives until that point (i.e. family members in the profession already, or some other family predispositions).
Oh sure that contracts says we would have to pay 10 millions if X happens, but then what is the likelihood of X happening, and what should be done to minimize it?
Of course it sounds easy: "just tell the business guys the risk and they will assess the probability", but in practice there are thousands of different risks associated with a contract, even the simplest one, so that ends up being EXTREMELY difficult.
And then you have all the contracts were the legal department thought they understood everything and it actually ends up not being as expected at all because rules and unclear, political and change like the wind, especially when it comes with international contracts.
"oh you can sue your employer for breach of contract over that" and the employee A) thinks that they can a do that and B) stand a chance of winning.