Definition of legal advice · Education, knowledge and experience in areas of the law · The ability and experience to apply that knowledge to specific areas. Legal advice is the issuance of a professional or formal opinion on the content or procedure of the law in relation to a particular factual situation. Providing legal advice will often involve analyzing a set of facts and advising a person to take a specific course of action based on applicable law. Legal advice applies the law, including statutes, case law and legal principles to a particular situation.
It provides recommendations on what course of action would best suit the facts of the case and what the person wants to achieve. When considering the social value of legal advice afterwards, note first of all that, since such advice, by its nature, is only given to the parties after they have acted, it cannot have initially helped them to comply with the law. Once again, it is best to communicate the findings of the preliminary investigation orally at a meeting with legal counsel. Mathews and Wiseman propose that these organizations can provide unlimited legal help, as long as they follow a series of best practices described in the document and do not charge for services.
For the past 25 years, courts in the United States and elsewhere have used and refined the distinction between legal information and legal advice to significantly expand the assistance that judicial personnel provide to clients, regardless of whether or not those personnel have a law degree. While private attorneys regularly refer their clients to other legal specialists, judicial staff and judges never do so. The prevailing strategy today is to hire trusted intermediaries, people who community members often go to for advice on their problems, in order to identify the existence of a legal problem and link them to the information and the most appropriate service provider that can help resolve the identified legal problem. However, “the difference between legal information and legal advice differs from place to place”, and there remains considerable confusion as to the relevance of the definitions of “unauthorized practice of law””.
It's difficult, even after the concept has been in use for a quarter of a century, to completely eradicate centuries-old loyalty to signs that read: “Judicial personnel cannot provide legal advice.” However, when a litigant's problems exceed available resources, it may be necessary and better for staff to refer them to a free or legal aid resource. Research into appellate case law on that topic revealed that judges had universally refused to articulate such definitions; instead, they addressed the issue on a case-by-case basis. Looking at the interactions between self-help service providers and people seeking assistance throughout the United States, including in Maryland, I have observed that Maryland provides clients with more information than the standard “legal information” provided elsewhere in the United States, and that the strategic and tactical advice they receive customers there are advantageous. However, it is not apparent a priori whether the protection of the labor product is socially desirable, since it depends on whether the legal advice that supports the labor product is socially desired155. Since people anticipate that their expected penalties for causing harm will be reduced due to the subsequent availability of legal advice, fewer people will be deterred from engaging in undesirable behavior.