What is ethically and professionally required of a lawyer answering questions on YA? -

According to the Restatement, an attorney-client relationship can be formed as long as two conditions are satisfied: (1) the quot;clientquot; behaved in such a way that a reasonable person in the lawyer s position would believe that she was being asked to provide legal services; and 2) the quot;lawyerquot; behaved in such a way that a reasonable person in the client s position would believe that the lawyer has either agreed to provide legal services or at least not refused to do so. I am curious about what kind of liability a lawyer could face by answering questions on here. Specifically I am thinking of Togstad v. Vesely.

On anonymous public message boards it is unlikely that anyone would reasonbly believe that an attorney-client relationship has been formed or that anyone could reasonably believe that the attorney has agreed to provide legal services. That said, I do think attorneys should be careful about giving individual, fact-specific legal advice on such forums. Giving general legal information and explaining the law is clearly OK, however.

Yahoo Qamp;A is an open forum and, as such, anyone can represent themselves to be anything they care to. If a memer of the bar answers a question in this forum he is not legally bound nor is he liable for the content of his answer.

There s no control on who does what here, it s all anonymous and to be taken with a grain of salt. There are a few people on here that say they re attorneys that their answers are such crap I know they ve never been to law school.