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Comment by Locke | Hacker News Reader

You mean to say that every legal issue is life and death?

There's no variability? There are no minor legal issues? I should consult a lawyer about, say, a parking ticket?

All chest pains are not a matter of life and death. Some are, others are simply indigestion. The only way to find out with any degree of certainty if yours is would be to call a doctor.

It occurs to me that I've strayed from the point I wanted to make. I'm not arguing that advice from non-lawyers can or should be used as a replacement for a lawyer's advice. I'm arguing against the idea that advice from non-lawyers is worthless and should be avoided at all costs.

The only reason I think it should be avoided at all costs is that it's near impossible to pick the good advice from the bad. If you knew enough to do that, you wouldn't be asking the question in the first place. How does getting a bunch of advice whose quality you have no way of judging help you at all? The best case scenario is that you ignore it and go get qualified advice, and the worst case is disaster.

How do you know what questions to ask your lawyer? How do you know what info might be pertinent to helping your lawyer to give sound advice?

Let's say I were to ask for advice about X. Someone posts, "Oh, when I went through X, my lawyer advised me to do Y and I think it really helped." So, then when I talk to a lawyer I can ask about Y. I don't see how opening a dialog hurt anything?

How does a little extra knowledge lead to disaster? Note: I'm not talking about forgoing a lawyer's advice in favor of listening to an internet nutjob.

You seem to be advocating ignorance and/or blind faith lawyers. How do you recognize a bad lawyer if you don't make any effort to educate yourself?

Ask your lawyer the question you posted here. They aren't machines, they don't simply answer the question you asked and then stop. They'll dig around and ask you for any pertinent info. You don't need people on Hacker News to help with that.

Weeding out bad lawyers is not something that posting here will help you with (unless maybe you ask for recommendations, which I would encourage). Every legal advice post here gets 100 differing opinions. If you assume any lawyer who tells you something other than what you heard here is a bad one, then all of them will be.

The best route might be to do what you do with a doctor or any other professional: get a few opinions. Do a few consultations. They're generally free, and at least will give you some idea.

The problem with "extra knowledge" is that you're getting some amount of information and some amount of misinformation, and you likely have no good way to choose between them.

I don't advocate blind faith in anyone, but legal advice from a lawyer is orders of magnitude more likely to be correct than legal advice from a non-lawyer.

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