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Comment by arbuge | Hacker News Reader

> This isn't something I'm even remotely cool with, so we ended the call a couple minutes later, and agreed to have our lawyers speak going forward. ... After that call, I asked my lawyer to reach out to their lawyer and was pretty much told that Seattle was approaching the problem as if they were pursuing Computer Fraud And Abuse (CFAA) charges. For information that they sent. Jiminey Cricket..

Not addressing the main thrust of the article I know, but I am genuinely curious: do a lot of people have a "my lawyer" ready to go?

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I don’t think it’s necessarily common in general. But it’s not surprising to me that someone who files a lot of public records requests has one, as a lawsuit is your main recourse if they refuse your request or demand fees you think are unreasonable, at least in the jurisdictions I’m familiar with.

I'd think it's pretty common. It's not necessarily "on-call" as in "waiting for you", but depending on what you do, you end up having contact with different lawyers in different areas. And in doubt, it's better to stick with someone knowing your situation.

Like, I had a few issues with the last place I rented, and during that, I entered the Mieterschutzbund, an association for tenant protection. Through this, I can get access to an hour of consulting with an expert from the association as well as one or two hours of a lawyer specializing in tenant laws. This doesn't take much longer than 1-2 days. So I guess I have a tenancy lawyer on call.

It's pretty common. My wife and I have a lawyer friend who handles small matters for us for the low, low cost of buying her meal the next time we go out. Plus I fix her (aluminum wired) electric.

There are 1.3M lawyers in the US according to the ABA. There are 250M adults in the US. I find it hard to believe that this is common (if "pretty common" means more than ~20% of adults?).

It's not like each person has a unique lawyer - One lawyer serves many clients. Especially since most people will only need legal help occasionally.

But yes I do agree, it's probably a minority of people that regularly use a specific lawyer.

Yeah, I think took that into account in my estimation. Not every lawyer will be willing to work for free for a friend (it's like doctors constantly being bombarded for free medical advice, or software engineers constantly asked to provide free IT services to fix people's computers/phones/routers/network). I also assume that law is highly specialized, so a lawyer specialized in Constitutional or Patent law may not want to handle Family law, Contract law, Employment law, or Personal Injury law.

I figure the number of lawyers willing to do such small favors is in the range of 1% to 10% of the 1.3M (wild guess). So if each of them had 100 friends-and-family "clients", it still wouldn't add up to "pretty common".

Yeah. I have three lawyers amongst very good friends and family. They are all up for general discussion about law or a bit of basic research. I don't think any would go as far as writing a letter on my behalf.

But there's a much smaller number of people from the social class likely to have lawyers as friends.

Also further reduce your number for adults in the name age bracket as practising lawyers.

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