Precise answers to your exact questions
Whether you want to confirm a point of procedure ahead of an administrative hearing or need to understand the effect of an anti-dilution provision, or anything else in between, Orbis Juris has you covered with precise answers from fellow lawyers via live one-on-one discussion.
To learn more, check out our short explainer video.
And, just for fun, put your legal knowledge to the test with the short trivia challenge set forth below. Older trivia challenges are available here.
Examples
All types of questions – whether in respect to litigation or transactional law – can be answered via Orbis Juris. Here are a few sample queries from which you can extrapolate both the potential breadth and specificity of issues which Orbis Juris can address.
- Will an existing UCC-1 secure new debt issued pursuant to a loan modification in Virginia?
- I’m looking for a Massachusetts case that illustrates circumstances of reasonable notice of a supervening event which preclude a defendant’s commercial frustration defense.
- What is the procedure for obtaining a writ of administrative mandamus where the petitioner is a student at a private college in California?
- Is board approval required to issue warrants to buy stock in Wyoming?
- I’m looking for an opinion from the US Ct of Appeals, 4th Circuit (or federal district court opinion from South Carolina) that applies Monell to a Section 1983 claim brought against a school district and/or school administrators.
- What is the process for serving a complaint on a resident of Indonesia?
- I need to know under what circumstances deferred compensation paid to an employee will qualify for exemption from the imposition of additional taxes as set forth in Section 409A of the Internal Revenue Code.
- I am looking to speak with someone who has tried a bench trial before District Judge XXXX of the 26th District Court, Oklahoma. Please indicate that you are “Very Confident” only if you have conducted two or more bench trials before District Judge XXXX.
It is up to the inquiring attorney to exercise care not to disclose work product, client communications or strategy via the query or during the discussion. If you have ever asked a question during a CLE event in order to gain better insight regarding an active case, then you know that it is pretty easy to reduce your issue to a pure legal question which does not reveal strategy or betray client confidences.
While it is important to draft clear and concise queries, even queries which contain latent defects (e.g., a query that seeks a court decision regarding a matter that has not been adjudicated) can be handled by Orbis Juris. In the same way that a false predicate is discovered and resolved in a conversation with a knowledgeable colleague, the Orbis Juris member will likely ferret out the latent defect and provide an answer based upon the correct state of the law.
Finally, for more details on how Orbis Juris works and the benefits it provides to both answer providers and answer receivers, check out the “Challenge,” “Solution,” “Cost,” and “Monetize” panels that follow.
You have a solo practice or are a member of a small firm; or perhaps you serve as in-house counsel at a small company or government agency. Even though you are experienced in a fairly wide range of matters, from time to time you encounter an issue that is outside of your “comfort zone.” You know that for another attorney who deals with this issue on a regular basis its resolution would probably be a simple matter. But for you it’s going to take a lot of time and effort to reach an answer. And you know that even after hours of toil you may still harbor some uncertainty as to the accuracy or completeness of your answer. You don’t want to turn away work (and risk losing a client to another firm), but you are cognizant of your obligation to provide competent, timely and cost-efficient representation. You wish there were a faster way to arrive at or, at least, confirm answers in these situations. You think about large law firms and the advantage their lawyers have in being only a phone call away from a thousand other lawyer colleagues whose collective knowledge covers every imaginable legal issue. You wish that those resources were available to you.
Orbis Juris is an online exchange for attorneys where members can obtain quick and accurate answers to difficult legal questions from other attorney members via live online consultation. This is how it works. A member submits a question (and a deadline by which he or she needs the answer) via Orbis Juris. To bid to answer it, other members submit i) an hourly fee, ii) proposed dates and times on which he or she can provide the answer and iii) a numeric indication of his or her confidence level. As the member seeking the answer you would be able to review the profile of the attorneys who have submitted the bids in order to review their legal experience and their Orbis Juris rating, which is based upon past performance and member feedback. The profiles are otherwise anonymous. Thereafter, you would select the optimal respondent (according to your assessment of the profiles, and your budget and timetable) and, using the built-in features of Orbis Juris, schedule and conduct your discussion. Membership to Orbis Juris is free.
Let’s say you speak for 30 minutes with a member who charges $400 per hour. Your cost would be $200. How you disposed of this fee would, of course, be entirely up to you. You could pass it on to the client as a line item in your invoice. Alternatively, you could absorb it and then offset it with the client-billable fees accrued during the call. These are just a couple of examples of the numerous alternatives for disposing of the fee. Whatever you choose, Orbis Juris frees you from time spent engaged in research which – as a practical matter and, perhaps, as a matter of professional ethics – may not be billable or, at least, entirely billable, and allows you to spend more time providing high value representation to your client. Moreover, with the assistance of Orbis Juris you will get the work product to the client faster, which will invariably create more billing opportunities.
So far, we have described Orbis Juris from the perspective of an attorney who is seeking information. But you are probably thinking also about the potential to earn money as a provider of information; and, indeed, you should. Every member of Orbis Juris is both a potential recipient and provider of information. Every competent attorney possesses knowledge, which at any given time another attorney needs. It is just a matter of connecting supply with demand. This is exactly what Orbis Juris does. So, you want to make $300 or $400 per hour (or whatever amount you think the market will sustain) for discussing legal issues that you know a lot about? Well, this your opportunity to monetize your knowledge without having to run a conflicts check or execute a retainer, and without having to draft a memo or brief or anything else for that matter. You just share your knowledge: something you probably already do with colleagues for free.