The Internet has opened up yet another opportunity for an eternally busy population to replace the traditional time-consuming act of speaking to a lawyer with a few clicks of your mouse.

Now, a site called legalopinion.com is targeting business and consumers across North America with links to local lawyers and access to a personalized legal advice service.

Not intended to replace the need for a lawyer, sites like legalopinion.com provide the first step in finding and initiating dialog with a skilled attorney to navigate the legal system.

With the emergence of interactive legal directories such as the legalopinion.com service, you can correspond via a secure site in regards to your specific legal situation, no matter how big or small it may be. So no more booking three weeks in advance for a legal consultation, figuring out how to schedule time in your day to meet with your lawyer, or worrying about the cost of obtaining legal advice.

But just how secure is getting legal advice online? How reliable is the information obtained? And how fully can your legal situation truly be explained without talking to a lawyer face-to-face?

By logging onto a site such as www.legalopinion.com, you can gain access to an online written opinion from a licensed lawyer in any of 25 areas of law, and in your geographic jurisdiction. It’s not only convenient and easily accessible, being available 24 hours of the day, but also fairly reasonable, cost-wise. Most online legal sites are highly secure, ensuring the 100% confidentiality that is necessary in any legal situation.

On the issue of the reliability of sources, lawyers that participate in any online legal advice site should be members in good standing of their state bar associations. With this comes some form of guarantee that you are indeed dealing with a licensed lawyer, and not a teenager playing around in his garage!

In order to ensure the effectiveness of using an online legal advice site, the quality, as well as the quantity, of the information that you give is crucial. The legalopinion.com system walks users through a number of prompts relating to the area of law chosen. The object here is to detract as much information as possible about your legal situation in order to ensure an accurate response from the lawyer. Lawyer responses are designed to provide you with decision-enabling options. After you receive your response, you should know if you have a case, understand what will be required to bring your case forward, and view your options for pursuing resolutions to your case. However, if you do not provide complete information, you may limit the responding lawyer’s ability to answer your question, which would take away from the online legal experience.

One final pressing question commonly asked about taking the law to the net is that of jurisdiction. With strict regulatory laws mandating that lawyers give advice only in the states in which they are licensed, what happens if a lawyer licensed in Texas ends up giving state-law advice to someone in Washington? legalopinion.com responds to this issue by providing access to representation in every state. You choose the state and the lawyer for your question.

At some point in our lives, we will all face a legal situation, whether it involves starting your own business, the creation of a will, assigning power of attorney, dealing with a defective product, or going through a divorce situation. Too often we put off getting legal advice until either the situation escalates into a monstrous legal mess, or it grows to the point that nothing can be done at all. Having access to an “E-lawyer” through an online legal advice site makes getting the information you need so much easier, and is more in tune with the demands of your busy lifestyle.

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