That presumes a lawyer will give you good legal advice. I've been given poor legal advice before by a lawyer, and been given even worse tactical advice. I've gone against a lawyer's recommendations before when their explanation and recommendation did not jive with my reading and understanding.
You should educate yourself and seek counsel if you believe you need it. Because ultimately the situation is no different than getting a physician's opinion or a consultant's opinion or whatever else - you seek that expertise because you feel you need it. And usually that means you have to pay for it. But a lawyer's opinion, even if it's a good opinion, doesn't inoculate you from being sued or threatened or whatever else an antagonizing party may do.
But don't freak out. Everyone is terrified when they get their first lawyer letter. Everyone is outraged when they get their second. And when they get their third (or fourth or however long it takes to learn), they use it for toilet paper.
> But a lawyer's opinion, even if it's a good opinion, doesn't inoculate you from being sued or threatened or whatever else an antagonizing party may do.
Actually, "reliance on advice of counsel" is a valid legal defense. It's an interesting legal privilege lawyers have given themselves.
Reliance on advice of counsel is not a blanket defense against any arbitrary crime you could be charged with or civil liability you might face. It is only a defense in a certain limited set of circumstances; and it also requires you to waive attorney-client privilege.
Can you expand on how one would educate themselves on this (besides getting a law degree), and how one would determine that they need legal counsel, besides having this vague feeling that they need it? Are there some rules of thumb that a normal, non-lawyer can follow to roughly gauge the seriousness of a written legal threat?
Hopefully someone more educated than me will chime in, but inevitably a C&D or some other lawyer letter will reference law (for me, it was trademark law) or will reference a contract. I've gotten both kinds, and found that it was easier to educate myself regarding the threats made in reference to the contract than in reference to the law.
Once you do some searching you'll get a better idea of whether you need legal counsel. And just because you receive a letter doesn't mean you need to respond no matter what absurd timeline the demanding letter might have suggested.
Eventually they'll have to put up (and file a lawsuit) or shut up.
A good rule of thumb is that when an attorney sends you a cease and desist letter, you should hire an attorney to read it and give you advice on what to do and/or how to respond -- especially if you are inclined not to assent to the demands made.
I know this, not only as an attorney today, but as someone who (before I got my law degree) did not do this and paid a very high price for my immaturity. Hiring an attorney could have saved me many thousands of dollars.
My wife went to law school. I know lots of lawyers. The spread between Justin (first in his class by a fat margin), and the bottom, oh, say, quarter of the class, is brutal.
Justin relishes a fight; he's confident. He's creative in his thinking. Many lawyers are paper pushers. They file the right documents, fill out the right forms, but they can't think tactically to save their lives. They're never going to change the outcome of a case.
