The Dangers of Virtual Cocktail Parties

WANT A MALPRACTICE SUIT WITH YOUR MARTINI?

Most attorneys are familiar with this cliched-party scenario: You are at an event and someone, upon hearing you're an attorney, proceeds to ask you what he should do in light of a certain legal situation. Do you answer? And if you do, how can you protect yourself from legal fallout, such as a claim of malpractice or a problem with conflict of interest?

The conundrum has now moved online, according to Steven A. Lewis, a principal of Lewis & Bacon in Sacramento, Calif., and a frequent speaker and author on legal ethics. In a February 2002 piece entitled "The Internet Even Affects Your Ethics" published in the California Bar Journal, he writes, "In the era of the Internet, the risks presented have moved from the real chat rooms of the cocktail party to the virtual chat rooms of the Internet. Thus, lawyers must exercise great caution in:

1. conversing with prospective clients in chat rooms;
2. making postings to newsgroups answering questions seeking legal advice; and
3. inviting and responding to inquiries made over law firm Web sites."

That advice is still sound today, he says, especially due to the proliferation of social networking sites. "If you give legal advice to anyone in that kind of setting, there might be, I think, a reasonable expectation by that person to rely upon that as legal advice," he says. "It's an unnecessary risk for a lawyer to give specific legal advice to a specific question without a disclaimer; there has to be an expectation that if you haven't disclaimed it at all and are giving erroneous advice to people relying on you, people could get hurt."

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