Instructions for posting legal problems

 

Before using contacting a lawyer through Legaltree, or posting a request for legal advice, all users must consider the following issues:

Each of these issues are discussed in greater detail below.

 

Legal advice privilege (also called solicitor-client privilege) protects from disclosure the contents of communications, passing between a lawyer and client, for the purpose of giving or receiving legal advice. However, as explained by the Supreme Court of Canada, legal advice privilege only attaches to communications that are confidential:

 

Where legal advice of any kind is sought from a professional legal adviser in his capacity as such, the communications relating to that purpose, made in confidence

by the client, are at his instance permanently protected from disclosure by himself or by the legal adviser, except the protection be waived.

(Descôteaux v. Mierzwinski, [1982] 1 S.C.R. 860 at 873, emphasis added).

 

Therefore, information disclosed on a public website such as Legaltree will not be protected by solicitor-client privilege. Accordingly, users should provide only brief information about their legal issue when posting requests for legal advice i.e. only the information that the user is happy for the entire world to know.

 

The practice of law in Canada is provincially regulated. Generally, each province has a law society that regulates the practice of law in its province. This is considered necessary to protect the public from having their legal affairs managed by people who are not properly qualified to do so.

 

Thus, only persons who are approved by the applicable regulatory authority are permitted to practice law in each province. Generally, it is an offence to practice law if you are not properly registered, and persons who knowingly receive legal assistance from persons who are not properly registered as lawyers may also be committing unlawful acts.

 

Therefore, it is good practice for all persons retaining lawyers to ask the lawyer for his or her registration number and then call the applicable law society to confirm that the lawyer is indeed registered to practice law, and is in good standing.

 

Furthermore, to ensure users are contacted by lawyers who are authorized to practice where they live, users are required to select their location when posting legal problems. If the user’s home town is not listed, the nearest city in the user’s province. Users may request that additional cities be listed by emailing the administrators of Legaltree.

 

When Legaltree users, whether lawyers or otherwise, contact each other through Legaltree, Legaltree simply sends a message to the recipient’s account and includes the email address of the sender. All subsequent communications between the sender and the recipient occur directly between those parties and without involvement of Legaltree.

 

Thus, the terms of any lawyer client relationship that may or may not develop between two persons who happen to meet on Legaltree are determined exclusively by those parties without involvement of Legaltree. As specified in the Terms of use, Legaltree is not liable to any user for losses arising from relationships formed between users. Legaltree is merely the “street corner” that the potential lawyer and client meet on.

 

Many people seek free legal advice, and many lawyers would like to provide it. Free legal advice may be available through the organizations listed on the Free Legal Advice Organizations page.

 

However, it is intended that the lawyer-client meeting facility provided by Legaltree be a forum for paying clients to find lawyers well suited to provide cost-effective, but not free, legal representation. Therefore, users should NOT post requests for legal advice and should NOT contact lawyers through Legaltree unless they are prepared to pay a reasonable price for the legal advice they seek.

 

Prospective clients should give some consideration to how much they are willing to pay (in total, or per hour) for a lawyer and provide an indication of that in their post setting out their legal problem.