walk-in legal shop
Here’s something that seems new. It’s a shop where you can go to get legal help.
Maybe I’m behind the times, but this seems like an idea with huge potential. The legal profession could do with some shaking up. There are several hurdles that make getting legal advice feel like such a big deal. It’s supposedly very expensive. You need to make an appointment. You feel like it’s something you just want to do for major problems. You wonder if you should dress up to go to the lawyer’s fancy office. You need to go to the richest part of town. You expect the process of talking to a lawyer to be complex and drawn out, advice to be full of qualifications, and to encounter a broad range of issues whose scope the lawyer will take pains to describe. You expect to be billed by the hour and through the nose, and you somehow need to know when to cut the legal advice (and the billing) off because it’s probably no longer important or relevant.
That all seems a bit old-fashioned. It’s in the strong interests of the lawyers to keep things semi-obscure and to maintain their priesthood at your expense.
The creation of easily accessible walk-in legal shops like lomaslegal seems to strike at the heart of this old-fashioned system. I think it’s great. I also think there’s a strong chance the traditional legal firms will turn up their noses at this sort of initiative, just like the traditional airlines turned up their noses at budget airlines offering cheap and easy no-frills service to the masses. Given that the law is so vast, that we bump into it so often, and that the legal profession preserves itself in a self-interested archaic state, it seems like there’s the strong potential for change.
Another initiative, also in Spain, is iAbogado. You just call them and pay a euro a minute. Or you can buy an electronic token and IM them for half an hour (though I’ve no idea why anyone would choose that low-bandwidth option).
But…. maybe it’s just me who’s behind the times and this sort of thing is already commonplace elsewhere.
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