I was hearing a story today about a person that needed some consultation about a legal issue and the unfortunate thing was that he couldn’t exactly afford to pay someone like $200/hr to get advice. The option was brought up though that there are usually a lot of law students that are usually willing to do it on a volunteer basis.
The first reaction from him was that there was no way he was going to get advice from a student since they are technically still learning and may give bad advice. Now this was the interesting I thought. Instead, since he can’t afford the cost he mentioned that the only way to do it was to research about the law himself.
To me, it seems like the option to get some free aid from a student seems like a step above from doing everything on his own. Even though they be a rookie and not technically a professional yet, I think at times like this it comes to a balancing act.
Basically, of course the attractiveness is the cost. At the same time, you know that what they tell you may be inaccurate. So like in this case, if I was using the service of a rookie I would say the trade off in saving a lot of money is that you still need to do a lot of your own research and due diligence. Granted you still need to do that with a professional, but in this case it is more.
In this case too, another way to think about it is do you think the person knows more than you about the topic? If so, at minimum it should help you faster in your research I’d say.