Who Ya Gonna Call?

Who needs lawyers when you have the internet? Michael Lewis writes about Marcus Arnold, a fifteen year-old who earned a reputation as a legal expert based mostly on knowledge gleaned from Court TV.

(NB/- New York Times article - free registration required.)

What astounds me is that the various lawyers whose ire young Marcus Arnold earned when he stepped onto their turf couldn’t find some legal pretext for getting AskMe Corporation to bar him from their legal message boards. I can only assume the writers who drafted the AskMe Terms of Service were very careful to build in a bulletproof clause limiting the liability of the service in general and the posters.

The real question the lawyers who attacked Marcus Arnold should be asking is why people continued to prefer his advice even once his true age and lack of legal qualifications was revealed. Was he especially good at explaining legal problems in layman’s terms? Did he just come across as being so confident that they trusted him implicitly? Did they give more weight to the ratings assigned by people he’d advised previously than to his lack of formal legal qualifications?

It’s going to be fascinating to see how this sort of thing develops in various professional fields as people get more used to turning to the internet to get advice and information. Given access to decent reference material, a reasonable level of literacy and decent communication skills there are a lot of areas where a motivated, intelligent and conscientious individual can act as the first port of call for members of the public wanting basic advice about some areas of the law, or social security benefit eligibility, or the rules and procedures governing, say, access to local authority services.

The trick, of course, is to recognise what sort of question you’re really being asked and to know your limits.