more than ever, we need to provide quality self-help
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[pre-launch status, as we search for a shlep team — can you contribute?]
The law sector of the blogosphere has been slow to react to the important survey announced last week by LexisNexis, in a press release captioned “US Adults More Likely to Turn to the Web For Legal Information, New Survey from lawyers.com Reveals” (Sept. 5, 2006). Beyond mere pointers to the story, I have only been able to locate one summary, at LegalBlogWatch, plus extensive excerpts at Slaw [“a cooperative weblog about Canadian legal research and IT, etc.”], in a posting with the ominous headline As we Knew, As we Feared, and the ending sentence, “More signs of the Apocalypse.”
Here’s Bob Ambrogi’s excellent summary from LegalBlogWatch:
“Where are Americans most likely to turn for legal advice? After family and friends, the Internet is now the single biggest nonlawyer source for legal information, according to a survey released this week. Three times as many U.S. adults today turn to the Internet for legal advice and information than did six years ago — 27 percent in 2006 compared with 10 percent in 2000. And while more still turn to family and friends for legal guidance, they are becoming far less likely to do so — 49 percent in 2000 relied on family and friends compared with 31 percent today.”
Given the extremely iffy nature of legal advice offered from family and friends, this trend seems like a very good one. Of course, it also means that an increasing number of Americans are engaging in one version or another of self-help law. This places an important burden on those who are engaged in promoting, creating and maintaining online self-help law materials, as well as those who help the public find such materials, to assure that the recources are accurate, easy to understand, readily available on as many topics as possible, and easy to locate.
Because they often cannot judge the reliability of a source, we all need to make sure that consumers know about the availability of high-quality and trustworthy resouces (e.g., from court and bar association websites and public or academic reference librarians) and how to find them. If the public chooses (consciously or not) to use for-profit websites, we also need to help them find reliable materials with reasonable prices. Are you rolling up your sleeves (or just rolling your eyes)?
One idea: Pick up a pen or pound out some pixels and let your local newspaper know about reliable self-help resources in your community.
Also, as stated on our “getting self-help help” page, the Maryland Peoples Law Library and Maryland Legal Assistance Network have created a helpful document called Legal Websites: Separating the “Good from the Bad and the Ugly”.
One idea: Pick up a pen or pound out some pixels and let your local newspaper know about reliable self-help resources in your community. Also, as stated on our “getting self-help help” page, the Maryland Peoples Law Library and Maryland Legal Assistance Network have created a helpful document called Legal Websites: Separating the “Good from the Bad and the Ugly”.
