Legal advice?

If you ever call an attorney to ask a simple question you may find that it's almost impossible to get a straight answer.  It was one of the things I hated the most about law school.  There are two reasons you won't be able to get a quick answer over the phone, 1) the answer to almost any legal question is "it depends."  It can become infuriating when you just want to know, but unfortunately the law is almost never straight forward.  If you ask a question that can easily be answered like "what is the statute of limitations for this?" You might get a response like 4 years, but even that can depend on the facts of the case.  If you ask something harder like "do I have a case" or "how long will this take" well then the attorney may need a crystal ball in order to answer your question. The problem is, some people look like they have a great case at first, but they fail to give us all of the information.  Conversely, I have a case that we originally thought was pretty worthless, but after some additional investigation (called Discovery - which is a very long process) we found the case is likely going to be quite lucrative.  It always depends.

2) If an attorney were to answer your question and only spoke to you that one time, without all of the information, your subsequent actions may set him or her up for a malpractice suit.  The problem is, the attorney-client relationship is whatever the client thinks it is.  So even if you never talk to that attorney, if you get all of your advice from a blog and act on it, you could technically sue that attorney later if it all goes wrong.

With all of that said, I have some knowledge, that I have discovered people should know, but don't.  I am going to start to share some of my knowledge on this blog (since it's private I can limit the exposure), but please understand this is not advice.  If you have a question, call me or another attorney.  But be prepared to get the answer "it depends" because that is likely to be the first thing out of my mouth.