That’s actually not the reason for hesitancy in giving advice in most cases. Lawyers hesitate to give advice online because: (1) It’s easy to form an seemingly

That’s actually not the reason for hesitancy in giving advice in most cases. Lawyers hesitate to give advice online because: (1) It’s easy to form an seemingly-inadvertent attorney-client relationship. (2) Once you have an attorney-client relationship, you have many duties to the client under the ethics rules. (3) Once you form an attorney-client relationship, you can potentially be subject to a malpractice suit (justified or not) if things go sideways. In general, lawyers tend to be open to discussing legal issues in ways that don’t involve advice to specific people about their specific situations. They are many (many, many many) legal publications where lawyers give away their knowledge for free or the cost of the issue/article/book/etc. They just don’t usually want to form attorney-client relationships lightly.