Reminding people that you are not an attorney - Perhaps the site can handle this for you?

Question

Out of curiosity I've been browsing this site and I notice many of the answers end in reminders similar to, if not matching:

I am not an attorney. I am NOT an attorney.

Seems like this might get old, both for readers and answer writers - I'm a programmer, so eliminating the need to repeat the same work (reading or writing such a disclaimer) is sort of my thing. I'd suggest instead of writing this at the end of answers, this community should perhaps popularize a policy page which explains as a general rule here that answers are subject to be incorrect and should not be taken as legal advice.

I would even suggest having the Stack Exchange team notify new Law SE users about this specifically via a special notification of some kind when visiting for the first time(s), considering the sensitive nature of this site's topic.

But ultimately, again, I think users should refrain from repeating this disclaimer over and over, saving time for both readers and themselves.

Answer 1

We have the above notice on pretty much every page we could get it on, on the main site.

It links to a more verbose disclaimer, but essentially, this is placed there.

However, there are a couple of issues with this:

• This notice is not visible on the mobile site (point your mobile browser to the site if you want to check)
• This notice is not visible anywhere on the app

That's part of the problem - that in the app, and on mobile, if you have already created an account elsewhere on the SE network, it's possible to create a new account on Law, and participate in all the core functions, without ever seeing this notice.

As for sending a notification - that's not an idea I think we've considered before. It might be possible. But you'd only have this happen for users when they register or associate their account. Anonymous visitors may still not see it.

An idea that comes to mind is a CSS tweak that would insert this in some prominent place, on mobile and on desktop, but to do it in the app would take additional work, specifically for us.