More than a year ago I wrote a post entitled “How lawyers think.” Its basic idea is that a lawyer’s job is to maximize legal protection of his client’s rights. Protecting rights means either of two things: one, letting the world know what your rights and their legal basis are, and, two, getting a court or tribunal to change the mind of someone who disagrees. Lawyers predict what kind of rights the courts will find that you have if it comes to litigation. That’s called giving legal advice, and that’s why lawyers think by imaging what would happen if this issue gets to court and how courts have decided similar issues in the past. All lawyers think about courts whether they are in litigation or not, and the courts is where the law becomes the law.

The previous sentence means that an act of Parliament is not really the law until the courts have adjudicated a dispute about what the specific legislative act or its provision means in a specific case. If all people understood the same text and applied it to the same facts the same way, we wouldn’t need courts. Lawyers predict what the courts will say the law is for the given facts, and litigators, in addition to that, offer judges their theories of what the law is in a given dispute. So advocacy in court is trying to influence the judge’s vision of what the law is and of how to apply it in this particular case. Without impartial and binding adjudication of disputes by the courts, the law is only what the strongest party (the police, the employer, the rich, and so on) says it is.

So if lawyering is predicting how the courts or tribunals will apply the law to a particular situation, blawging, in my opinion, is the same thing but by way of informal and accessible writing in a blog. A blawg should predict what the law is in some interesting case of current interest. A blawg is always a legal opinion, but it’s almost never legal advice, because it is addressed to a broad audience rather than a client. If I write about telephone number portability, the blog post should give a basic idea about what enforceable rights you will have if your telephone company decides to take your phone number from you. A blawg is not about what will happen, but rather about what you can reasonably accomplish by taking your case to a court or tribunal, if you have the time, the money, and the expertise.

In this sense, blawgs can be a little removed from reality because most people don’t have the time, the money, and the expertise to go to court. In fact, of those who do begin litigation, most never sustain it all the way to trial, which would be the first chance a judge will get to decide the case. That’s why lawyers, of course, must give practical advice in addition to pure legal advice, and it’s hard, and that’s why there is a disconnect between the public and lawyers. The client expects a solution and doesn’t care about the method, and the lawyer often must think in terms of courts because that’s all he or she may be qualified to do.

Perhaps blawgs can bridge this gap by educating the public about the law and teaching the public to self-regulate due to better knowledge of legal consequences. But unless we make access to the courts cheaper and easier so judges can hear and decide more cases that deserve to be heard and decided, blawgs alone will face an uphill struggle.

Pulat Yunusov is a Toronto litigation lawyer.

 

(Post sponsored by AdviceScene)