Good idea! pre-litigation legal consultation fee is quite a cost here. People will go to the site in search of legal opinions and jurisprudence relevant to the case and maybe skip pre-consultation, before deciding to move on or not with the case.

It will also become a haven for law students and newphyte lawyers who are honing their skills.

To add a little, the crowd wisdom can also be tapped for ongoing cases providing inputs to court battle strategies and tactics on the cases they are interested.

Hey the idea expanding: Will it not simulate court battle? With the crowd divided into defense, prosecution, spectators and the whole crowd as the judge?

Well, your sentiments are indeed noble.

I am a lawyer. My license is limited to advising charity cases only and I only do a small bit every year, through the one agency that I am legally allowed to work through. The reason I do this is because I am well aware of how inaccessible the legal system is to everyone, lawyers included (hey, sometimes we have legal needs too!).

My first thought about the whole accessibility question is: You get the system you vote for. A painful truth but that is my political statement on this issue.

Next, on the whole matter of case law and accessibility. Well, within the profession there are services like you describe. Essentially that is how a modern law library works; most of it is online. There are various pay-for-use services out there.

There are also some access to justice projects where you can do free lookups, although whether these are very accessible I don't know.

So after this blah blah blah stuff, here's what I think of your idea. Move away from the idea of making every person an expert in the law. It is potentially dangerous, just as making every person an expert in medicine is. There is no cookbook for being a professional, sorry.

But it is very good to work toward every person being an informed and responsible citizen with access to the information they are interested in studying. It's sad that the newspapers in Canada (and probably USA) really don't cover legal topics in any depth, considering how important they are to us all.

I've thought about crowdsourcing legal advice, and that is where I think we are on the same wavelength. There are lawyers who will give their two cents worth, but no lawyer is going to incur liability for giving bad advice, so the whole thing has to be set up as a "you can't sue me for this" deal.

I think a website organized to give legal advice and direction for common issues would be a very good idea. I think lawyers would participate in it, so long as the advice remains general and is not specific to any given person's situation.

The issues that come up tend to be the same ones in a lot of situations. May as well let people know what they are.

Your idea definitely has merit. Because law varies from one place to another (every province, every state, to being with, not just every country), there is huge room to diversify and expand a site or service like this. I think it would bring a LOT of traffic.

Oh, and btw, I think an even better idea would be a similar site about INSURANCE> think I'll go put that idea in right now. ;-)

Cheers,

jill

PS to Cycko

I think you have another cool idea and you should set it up as a separate idea - on-line Judge Judy sort of thing. ;-)

I like this sooo much because I like (most) lawyers sooo little.

Expect most lawyers to tell you that regular people can't do it, and liability risks will be high.

Jay

I like it, what I think would really help is if people could know about it, like jill said a person can't find any present, past , ongoing or anyother info about the legal system on an ongoing basis from any common media. Also I had some legal issues a little while ago and could find very little info about how system works. thats why I say somehow it would need to be easily available. Maybe thru links from current sources that are so lacking? bye.

This idea went quiet for a while but it is a good one.

I think its best chance to achieve the goal of empowering people to solve or at least contribute to solving their own legal problems is to have lawyers who moderate discussion forums that anyone can participate in.

There are going to be lots of issues around implementation but that doesn't mean it's impossible.

There would be fewer legal problems in the first place if more people understood the law BEFORE they had issues ;-)

Knowledge is power.