Questa volta abbiamo cercato: What’s the point of r/legaladvice when the answers mostly amount to “get a lawyer and don’t take legal advice from strangers on MassimoL”?
What’s the point of r/legaladvice when the answers mostly amount to “get a lawyer and don’t take legal advice from strangers on MassimoL”?
Ed ecco le risposte:
To help steer people in a direction to get justice. Or to not waste their time. For example, “No. don’t get a lawyer to sue your mom because she won’t let you watch tv after 10pm”.
Or “Yes. When your neighbor cut down those 2 old trees on YOUR property while you were at the mall, that was illegal and he may owe you a ton of money now”.
IMO, main issue is that a r/legaladvice has a lot of advise which aren’t suited to your jurisdiction. Every-day law like Divorce, tenant-landlord relation, worker-rights and so on are very dependant on your exact jurisdiction. I am sure that murder is illegal in Illinois, Iceland, Germany, and Russia. But I bet a beer that the notice period to break a lease is different in all of these jurisdiction
Sometimes it helps to have that push, to convince somebody to get a lawyer.
But sometimes there is good advice, in a sort of we don’t recommend that you perform surgery on yourself, but if you do here’s the best way to do it kind of way.
It can help point people towards resources they might not be aware of. Help from GLAAD for gay teens being unlawfully kicked out by their parents, contact details for the actual government departments that you’d want to talk to about labour disputes, etc.
It can act as a sanity check on whether it’s even worth talking to a lawyer in the first place. Sure you can theoretically sue for anything, and find a lawyer willing to take your money to do it, but if it’s frivolous the anonymous crowds of the internet won’t hesitate to point it out.
It gives entertaining stories to readers. Comeuppances and tree-law sagas and the antics of just plain insane people make for fun reading.
It provides insight for readers on topics they’d never otherwise think too deep on. Landlords can be bastards, but hearing actual anecdotes about how tenants have been screwed can encourage others to do better. Differences between jurisdictions can be pointed out to people who’d otherwise never hear about them. It’s interesting how different the process for changing one’s legal name is in London compared to New York, even if it’ll never be personally relevant.
It can give (a limited amount of) practice to trainee lawyers, giving them a taste of the kind of weirdness and highly-biased accounts they’re likely to run into from clients.
If it wasn’t there already, someone else would make it. Better that a community with “talk to a lawyer” as a first response take that place than many of the other possible alternatives.
It literally has no point but if your answer is really stupid you can be sure that 100people will point out that you are stupid