[yason]

disclaimer: this is not legal advice, I am not a lawyer

Just curious since this keeps coming up. Why would people add these IANAL disclaimers, especially on an anonymous forum?

I would assume that if you wanted to stand out as a lawyer in a discussion you would have to explicitly announce yourself to be one and because this is internet most people still wouldn't believe you (even if you really were a lawyer). I cannot fathom how would that go the other way around.

Disclaiming that "I'm not a lawyer" sounds a bit like an introduction to a string of other disclaimers, as in me not being a medical doctor, CS professor, airline pilot, or law enforcement official either.

Is there a court case where someone took, out of thin air, someone else's word as if he was a lawyer while he wasn't and never said he was, suffered some losses because of it, and actually won in court? Or what's the reason for adding the IANAs?

[gknoy]

> Why would people add these IANAL disclaimers, especially on an anonymous forum

I would imagine it's partly a courtesy ("You should take this with a grain of salt") and partly a CYA ("Under no circumstance should you take this as legal advice, nor sue me for giving bad legal advice, etc").

[ashark]

I think it's a reaction to lawyers posting "I am a lawyer; I am not your lawyer; this in not legal advice", presumably as some part of explicit or implicit professional ethical or legal obligation, plus the typical "IANAL" disclaimer that frees the poster from a bunch of wasteful hedging and qualification in the rest of their post by setting expectations at the beginning. It's the reasonable "IANAL" merging with negation of the maybe-also-reasonable disclaimer actual lawyers use, to form a less-reasonable mix of the two.

[EDIT] probably also part of a US thing about constant over-disclaiming and posting rules/regulations everywhere, which I gather is really weird and makes us come off as kinda repressed from the perspective of people from other countries, even those from the more repressive variety. I don't know, I'm American and going on the reactions I've read of foreign world travelers to Americans' love of basically-useless posted quasi-legal language on seemingly every flat surface, and poles where flat surfaces aren't available.

[logfromblammo]

It's shorthand for "you should be consulting a real lawyer about this, instead of taking a layperson's uninformed and unprofessional advice on the Internet, but here's my opinion on it anyway."

I am not a lawyer, but I think the amount of corporate shell games and fictitious entities should be proportional to the amount of money at stake in the estate.

If grandma has $300k left to her name, and can still fry her own eggs every morning, then a boilerplate last will, durable power of attorney, and medical plan from a strip mall estate planning lawyer is probably enough to keep the wolves and vultures at bay long enough to sound the alarums.

If grandma still owns a profitable business in her own name, you're going to need to burn some billable hours from a pressed-suit type, and maybe register some new corporations or LLCs.

Most people can get it done with the strip mall lawyer, without trying anything fancy. The HN crowd has more money to protect than most people, so they're going to want the downtown high-rise lawyer. And if that person recommends anything that does not sound incredibly boring, commonplace, and tedious, you probably got the wrong guy, and need to walk to a different firm.

But since I am not a lawyer, I'd recommend re-titling everything worth cataloguing to a handful of New Mexico LLCs, as they do not require annual reports or disclosure of the principals, and get EINs for them via a nominee, so they won't show up in the cursory asset searches for your elder. The valuable assets would be divided up into separate legal baskets, so no one can come in and take everything in one swoop. Then you lease the property back to the former owner, from the LLC, with a "peppercorn rent"--essentially a gestural payment that can be easily made, so long as the lessee remains competent. So if anyone ever gets your elder declared incompetent, or if they die, anything worth stealing immediately reverts to a predetermined person's legal control. You have to assume that someone is watching your loved one circle the drain, with the intent of searching their pockets once they stop moving.