Free Legal Advice on the Internet

On numerous online discussion forums in various countries, ordinary people pose specific legal questions and both ordinary people and lawyers answer them. This article considers this new and rapidly growing method of providing legal advice. It emphasizes qualitative over quantitative issues. It seeks to answer questions such as “What kind of questions are being asked?”; “What sort of people are giving legal advice?”, “What sort of people are getting legal advice?”.

For those few legal systems that I know something about, I also have considered the question, “How good is the advice?” This is a comparative study, involving discussion forums for Armenian, Australian, Austrian, Brazilian, Canadian, Croatian, English, French, German, Italian, Moldovan, Portuguese, Russian, Scots, Spanish, Swiss, Ukrainian, United Kingdom, and United States law.