Legal Misinformation on the Web, Starting with a Supreme Court.

Sure there's a lot of legal misinformation on the web, but I wasn't expecting it on the website of a state supreme court (not Colorado's). The enormity of legal resources and forms—the good and the bad--on the internet has been positive for my practice. Documents are a commodity; critical thinking, however, including knowing the right form or resource to start with, is of much greater value.

You can imagine, then, my concern upon discovering reliable sources of THE LAW to be in disagreement over the wording of a state court rule. Sure, I expect disagreement over matters of legal opinion, but the text of rules and statutes are objective, not subjective, statements of the law. They are what they are. And they used to be published only in books available in libraries; now they are everywhere.

My Colorado client wants to expand its business into another state. A set of rules issued by the supreme court in that state governs an aspect of my client’s plan, so my firm checked those rules using a subscription-based online research library. Seeing no problems, we gave our client the initial go-ahead and began arranging for a lawyer in that other state to get involved.

In a subsequent call with my client, I needed to refer to a specific portion of the rule. Instead of taking the time to log-in to our subscription service, I pulled-up the rule on the state supreme court’s website. What I saw stopped me mid-sentence. The rule on the court’s site clearly prohibited an aspect of my client’s plan. Stunned, I asked my client to give me some time to double-check our initial conclusion.

Several phone calls later, we confirmed that the subscription service had the official and correct version of the rule, and that the state supreme court’s site had inadvertently omitted an amendment, which omission they immediately corrected. The client’s plan was on again.

The incident was a great reminder to me to heed a lesson I repeatedly tell my children. Don’t believe everything (or much of anything) you read on the web. When answers matter, go to the definitive source, which may not be what you think it is. Most readers of that state supreme court site would not think it necessary to verify its accuracy, but I hope their lawyers would.