In his blog today, Bob Ambrogi writes about several new services – public.resource.org, altlaw, and preCYdent – that give lawyers and consumers access to public records — specifically federal (and eventually state) case law. It’s great to see content in the public domain being made more accessible to consumers, because our experience at Avvo doing so has certainly been an interesting one.

We rely on public records from the state bars to populate certain elements of lawyer profiles on Avvo.com. For example, this is where we get lawyer’s licensing information and disciplinary sanction records. Accessing this information, however, has been an eye-opening experience.

What I’ve learned is that the term “public” record is very much open to interpretation and in fact varies widely from state bar to state bar. Some states make this information easily and freely available to the public. The Washington State Bar is a great example of this. Others are a bit more difficult – sometimes because they don’t have the systems in place to make the information accessible. There are some states, however, to which the term “public” seems to mean anything but – they put up barrier after barrier to making this information accessible. It’s somewhat perplexing, because Avvo’s mission is very much aligned with that of the state bars: making the legal system accessible to everyone.

We will continue to do everything we can to make public information truly accessible to the public, even if we have to jump through hoops to do it. Kudos to these web sites for doing the same.

This entry was posted on Friday, February 1st, 2008 at 10:32 am by Paul Bloom, VP of Products and Marketing and is filed under Paul Bloom Posts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.