menu
SUIT UP OR SHUT UP!:
ANALYSING R/LEGALADVICE'S COMMUNITY NORMS
by davina jou, #3041201972
As someone aspiring to work in law as an entertainment lawyer (knock on wood), my first instinct was suspicion. What good could asking a community of strangers — with no guarantee of getting a response at all, much less someone with credentials — possibly do? Who's to say anyone on the subreddit knows what they’re talking about? All worsened by the recent discussions regarding the increasing prevalence of AI lawyers. Despite the fact that legal AI agents still hallucinate more than 17% of the time on a good day, a 2025 Clio consumer survey found that 57% of consumers had used or would use AI to answer a legal question (Magesh et. al.; Hoover). And if regular people are happy to use AI to answer legal questions, then what’s the point of r/legaladvice?
One question present here is: is there still value in community-sourced advice in the age of artificial intelligence? But as I looked deeper into the r/legaladvice subreddit, some more uncomfortable observations surfaced.
The r/legaladvice moderators run a tight ship. This is not a popcorn sub — a subreddit for meaningless entertainment. This is a subreddit for legal advice and legal advice alone, so any “off-topic ranting and pointless arguments”, posts that don’t contain questions, or comments that don’t directly answer questions will be deleted at the moderators’ complete discretion (/r/LegalAdvice Front Page). Thus, the subreddit generally rewards clinical language and tends to doubt posts from people who are more emotional and lack that institutional documentation. In a now-deleted post that I think functions as a significant case study, OP is accused by mods of “fishing for updates” when they asked the subreddit what legal action they could take if they suspected their friend was murdered.
Legal trouble is inescapable in modern-day America — in just 2024 alone, U.S. state courts received approximately 70 million case filings, which is approximately one state-court filing for every five U.S. residents (NCSC). What to do, when lawyers are so expensive and the legal system is so confusing? Fear not! In the age of the Internet, a simple post or search can save you from a potential legal pickle. This is the ecosystem r/legaladvice exists within. Self-described as “a place to get simple legal advice”, posters describe potentially legal problems and are then steered in the right direction by their community members.
context & research framing
The moderators — in a move that parallels AI intake tools — want to categorise messy human situations into ‘answerable’ and ‘not’. But what happens when the lived experience becomes distorted, flattened, or even erased when filtered through an algorithmic system?
Thus, in this research project for my digital hermeneutics course, there are two interconnected questions I’m structuring this project around:
How does r/legaladvice's operational, incident-report genre convention function as the price of legitimacy?
What does the community lose, in its capacity to help posters as people, by enforcing it?