Last Updated on May 11, 2022 by Fair Punishment Team

This is the introduction to the Ask a lawyer Podcast hosted by Blaine Clooten.  This is the first episode of many to come and you can either subscribe directly on iTunes here or read the transcript below.  We are excited to share this exciting new podcast with you and look forward to your feedback.  If you do have any questions or comments, please go to @mylegalcenter on Twitter to post a question and we will respond accordingly. Enjoy the transcript below and the episode!

Transcript

Blaine ClootenThis is Ask a Lawyer with Blaine Clooten. Let’s get moving. So what makes this possible? We are sponsored or hosted by the fairpunishment.org website. If you have legal questions, you should hit us up @mylegalcenter on Twitter and ask us questions and I’ll answer them here. This is going to be interesting because there’s other ask a lawyer podcasts that exists, but my take on things has been that a lot of times they’re either by lawyers and then essentially for other lawyers or they remain a little too complicated. And so my goal with all of this is to get folks some basic legal information for whatever their situation is and that this would be a fairly wide amount of information, but not necessarily super in-depth unless people are asking me in-depth questions and then I’ll go in-depth. But I guess I should take a step back and talk a little bit more about what this is and what this is not.Blaine Clooten So what this is is a good starting point. This is a good baseline. If you have a legal question and you need a starting point and you just need to know some of the basic information, this is a good start. What this is not is substitution for competent legal counsel. You should always go get your own lawyer in a given situation. Get that advice from a qualified attorney if you have a legal situation, but for a lot of people, they may not have access to a lawyer readily, or they may be trying to handle a case themself, or they may just need a starting off point. Maybe they’ve just been served with some divorce papers or some custody papers and they want to know very at a basic level, what is this? What’s going to happen next? What’s going on?Blaine ClootenAnd that can be daunting as a task. And what I realized after practicing for a while was that a lot of folks when they call and they do their initial consultation, they’re asking the same questions, which is about the process. What happens first and then what happens next? So let’s just talk about some of the different things that you can look forward to hearing about, which are going to be things like depositions, divorces, lawsuits generally. We’re going to do quite a bit on false accusations, suing people, wills and estates, and then whatever other legal questions people have, I’m going to dive into those. And no question is too off the wall or no situation is too ridiculous because I’ve probably heard something more ridiculous than whatever situation that you’re expressing. But what we’re going to be doing is we’re going to be taking these topic areas and we’re going to be dissecting them kind of point by point and giving people an idea of what they can expect in these different type of scenarios.Blaine ClootenAnd at the end of each episode or at the end of each discussion, the takeaway is that people are armed with information so that they know what to do next. And maybe what they do next is they need to contact an attorney. But whatever that is, they’re going to decide. And my thought was it’s better to have some limited information, even if I’m doing a whole bunch of disclaimers saying, I’m not your attorney, we’re not your attorney and this is not legal advice. It’s just general info information. Even that is better than no information whatsoever is the thought here.Blaine ClootenSo I’m going to be joined in studio pretty frequently by Andrew McGuire. He’s a co-founder of the fairpunishment.org website along with me. He is the head of operations. I’m the head media. What that basically breaks down to is that he’s in charge of the website and I’m in charge of continuing to bring content, especially in the podcast realm, or if this is going to be on YouTube or wherever this ends up going, that’s what I’m here to do is to bring you that high quality information from a legal perspective. All of the information that comes to the website, it’s… The articles that are written are written mostly by other folks that are journalists and they’re doing their due diligence with research, but those are not necessarily written by attorneys. And those are for general use, general purpose information, but when I’m giving information, it’s from a lawyer’s perspective. And that’s why I’m encouraging folks to go to the @mylegalcenter on Twitter to ask questions, or you can also go to the fairpunishment.org and ask questions that way.Blaine ClootenSo I’m looking forward to getting into a lot of these different topic areas. It’s a little bit easier for me to have the back and forth dialogue with another person. So a lot of these are going to be two-person a type podcast where we’re going back and forth with the information. And I look forward to doing this and hopefully getting a lot of questions in the future. So this first video or this first podcast is not really answering legal questions. I’m not doing any deep dives today. This is more of what you can be looking forward to in the future. I’ve got a lot of thoughts on a lot of things and I’m not afraid to share them, but we need to get some questions in front of me so that I can give you my thoughts.Blaine ClootenI’ve got a lot of experiences from a lot of different type of trial work and case work. So for instance, I spent seven and a half years as a prosecutor doing criminal work. I’ve worked on a lot of thousands of cases doing that. Worked with lots of defense attorneys obviously because I was the prosecutor. Right now I’m a pro tem judge, which means a part-time judge within my local city, but primarily my practice at this point is doing personal injury cases, family law cases, and estate planning. I’ve done a lot of bankruptcy cases in the past. I’ve done a little bit of everything because at one point what I did was what I called door law, which was whatever problem somebody walked in the door with that day, that was the law I was doing that day. So I’ve done evictions and landlord-tenant cases, I’ve done contract disputes, certainly land disputes and basically almost every realm that you can contemplate, I’ve either talked to somebody about it or I’ve litigated it.Blaine ClootenSo all questions are fair game. Bring them on. And we’ll look forward to some more questions on the next time that we have an installment of Ask a Lawyer and we’re going to keep everything moving. So hope you’ve enjoyed this and look forward to doing more. Thank you.