Legal and Lawyers

The alternatives to getting an expensive big city lawyer are expanding at the moment because of the fact that there is community wide recognition that the cost of legal services is almost unbearable for individuals, small businesses and even the managers of departments within large and medium sized businesses. If you are an individual you can look at applying for legal aid, which is often only available on a very limited scope and is almost always means tested. Legal aid lawyers are often either funded by government or by charitable organisations and only have the resources to allocate to very specific types of cases for which their funding mandate allows. It is also the case now that some large firms of lawyers offer systematic programs of pro-bono legal services which allow people who would otherwise be unable to afford legal help to get it in a very limited way.

Self help and self representation is also becoming a very common occurrence with the proportion of self represented litigants in courts constantly rising, especially in relation to areas which have a very personal impact such as family law or criminal law. The enormous amount of information available on the internet is also something that gives self-represented litigants much more information about their situation than they would other wise get and enables them to more effectively represent themselves. However, much of the legal information on the internet needs a lawyer who is a trained professional to interpret and analyse the information so that it can be used meaningfully and effectively in front of the courts and other lawyers. The internet has also allowed the development of online low cost legal services which enables the best of both worlds because people get access to a professional, but the costs of meeting in an office can be cut using the fact that the interaction is occurring online sometimes over vast distances. This development, particularly after the advent of web 2.0 technology has meant a great leap forward in the broader access to legal services which ordinary people now have.