Transcript
"I'm curious about where free advice ends and establishing value for expertise begins. I do free consults for family and friends, since you never know where it will lead, but at some point you don't wanna give it away for free. You have a bright line rule about this or is it case by case?"
Yes. So even though I'm not a practicing attorney, I'd get questions from people all the time. Because I don't even practice law, I often find it quite annoying. So I try to get the quickest answers I can that are accurate. But most of the time I tell them, I just don't know the answer. If you don't know the answer and it's in a different practice area than yours you can always give referrals, which is nice. If you give referrals people remember it. You should give advice to the extent you can. I just would be very careful about coming across as a snob or being rude to people about asking for advice. I've known attorneys who do that too. If you do have the ability to answer people's questions, you should definitely try to do that, but be careful. Don't try to advertise you're an attorney. The idea really is often you want to say, I'm thinking about that and get back to you. Then sometimes call these people and have a personal call. I had an experience once where I was taking acting lessons years ago and all these people in the acting class found out I was an attorney and it didn't matter to them that I wasn't practicing. They just figured that I would know about all this stuff. And so they had all these issues with how can we negotiate contracts for them to be in commercials and contracts with their agents and personal disputes. Unfortunately it wasn't really something that I was set up to do and it became annoying. It got to the point where the guy that was leading the acting class, wanted me to file lawsuits for him. You just need to be very careful.
