If you want to gaze into the stupidity practiced by Americans on a day-to-day basis, Reddit’s r/legaladvice is a goldmine. Over 460,000 people subscribe to the eight-year-old subreddit, which consists of beleaguered average citizens asking for legal advice about situations that are sometimes horrific and sometimes blackly comic—like the guy stealing ketamine from a veterinarian and then wondering if he can sue the vet for it being “tainted,” or the person repeatedly filing complaints with his condo building for “pet birds chirping” in response to birds outside his window. The best—or worst, depending on your outlook—posts wind up on r/bestoflegaladvice or the Twitter account @legaladvice_txt, where they are inevitably gawked at and mocked.

But it doesn’t take long to find examples of people who have actually gotten good advice, like an all-time top post about a woman who was taken to small claims court for sitting on someone’s laptop at a party. The OP (original poster) described breaking the laptop screen and offering to pay $2,200 (the cost of the whole laptop), before the laptop owner insisted she had to pay for the price of an upgrade. Commenters told her she would only need to pay the costs of repairs or the price of the depreciated original laptop. As a result, the OP told the forum in a later update, she fought the laptop owner in small claims court and wound up paying less than $300.

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But one of the world’s leading experts in legal ethics agrees that state bar associations are currently ill-equipped to deal with unmet legal needs. “The bar needs to get on board with these online systems, because they’ve priced legal services out of range for so many consumers,” Deborah L. Rhode, a Stanford law professor, told me over the phone. “In an era in which people are used to getting information online, there’s just no way to shut these sites down. The bar has to both acknowledge its own contribution to the problem of unmet legal needs, and figure out a way that it can be helpful in these contexts and educating people about the risks of incorrect advice.”

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The specialization of r/legaladvice’s moderation team can be an asset, because knowledge areas are so specific that hiring an attorney doesn’t necessarily guarantee good answers to all your legal questions. “There’s a ton of evidence that suggests that it’s the experience much more than the legal credential that makes a difference in whether you get quality services,” Rhode said. “In countries where specialists are allowed to give legal advice, studies find that they do better than lawyers. They do it in a very defined practice area and they don’t stray out of their specialty. They often have much more knowledge about that limited set of problems.”

Think of it this way: You wouldn’t trust your divorce lawyer to help you deal with your eviction, but you might turn to your housing rights activist friend for advice that could save you your apartment. You wouldn’t ask a contract lawyer to help you get a green card, but you might get some advice on how to start the process through a social worker. The only advantage to an attorney, in these cases, is that you’d be able to sue them for malpractice if things went south. “The risk is always that they’re not going to get qualified advice,” Rhode added. “But in an era of increasing specialization, many of them would not do better with a licensed attorney half the time.”

Another gap filled by r/legaladvice is telling people when they need a lawyer—which is often the most important advice of all. In a forthcoming paper, Rhode wrote about a survey from the American Bar Association that found that two-thirds of Americans surveyed in 2013 reported having a “civil justice situation” in the previous year and a half. Only 9 percent of them described these situations as “legal,” however, suggesting they simply didn’t know what a lawyer could do for them. Here’s the kicker: Cost was critical in only 17 percent of cases. The most common reason these people didn’t get a lawyer was that they didn’t know they even needed one.