JAG 2.0: Legal advice and dissemination in online military lawyer forums

The increased presence of web-based technologies and social media has affected professional legal discourse and practice, as testified by the popularity of computer-mediated legal counseling and assistance. These emerging online discourse communities facilitate laymen’s access to justice by filtering legal knowledge through direct and comprehensible online language (Turnbull 2013) and lighten the load on traditional institutions by providing brief service and advice (Zorza 1999) on whether or not a potential party should pursue face-to-face legal procedures and how to do so. Online legal advice may be particularly helpful in military law, due to the military community’s geographically dislocated and mobile nature (Parcell and Webb 2015) and its variety in terms of jurisdictions and legal statuses. The present study focuses on the interaction and trust building of military law experts and laymen in the Q&A forums of the Justia Ask a Lawyer and Just Answer. Military Law websites. It starts by outlining linguistic trends signalling ongoing changes in legal discourse due to the influence of online and military discourse. It then adopts a methodological framework based on corpus assisted discourse studies uniting qualitative analysis - and more specifically critical discourse analysis and pragmatics - and quantitative analysis supported by the Antconc 3.5.6. software (Anthony 2018). Moreover, it inquires into the discursive strategies that foster popularizing linguistic accommodation and reduce potential misunderstanding, as well as pragmatic markers such as hedging and certainty evaluation that endow the legal expert’s advice and predictions with a flexible degree of accuracy and empower the client while protecting the lawyer should the client not be satisfied.