The following is a list of attorneys I’ve run across who have added the Avvo Badge to their websites. (If you’ve added the badge and would like a little link love from the blog, send me your URL and I’ll post it here.)

Alex Thomason
Becki Ashbaugh
Brett Hill
Bruce Cohen
Christina Nelson
Christopher Wright
Daniel Janich
Daniel Shanfield
Daniel Swedlow
David Ashbaugh
David Betz
David McGuffey
Don Heyrich
James Michael Kelley
Jesse Miller
Joanne Musick-Long
Joe Campos
John P. Ahlers
John Riper
John Siegel
Jon Fox
Lawrence Glosser
Mark Rosencrantz
Matt Runkel
Melissa Chavin
Michael Gustafson
Michael Zoretic
Paul Cressman
R. Miles Stanislaw
Reuben Donig
Richard Skalbania
Richard T. Beal
Robert Marconi
Ryan Sternoff
Ryan Walters
Scott Markowitz
Scott Sleight
Sean Russel
Sharon Chirichillo
Shawn Newman
Sok-Khieng Lim
Zach McIsaac

1. Alani Golanksi, Brooklyn, NY

2. Laura Wasser Los Angeles, CA
3. Sean Cecil Federal Way, WA

4. Mark Kaplan Los Angeles, CA
5. Roni Deutch North Highlands, CA

6. Elizabeth Powell Tacoma, WA

7. Sharon Chirichillo Olympia, WA

8. Craig Kennedy Vancouver, WA

9. Jon Scott Fox Bellevue, WA

10. Ruth Bader Ginsburg Washington, DC.

How do niche international transportation lawyers dominate their category online? Michael McDaniel, Byron Countryman, Christoph Wahner and Geoffrey Gill at the Law Offices of Countryman and McDaniel have figured it out with an exhilarating gallery of I-can’t-look-away images of transportation disasters. I’ve just killed about an hour in my office at Avvo going through page after page of transportation accidents. Granted the site is built in what looks like the beta version of FrontPage 1.0 (complete with cheezy “animations” and annoying audio), but it doesn’t matter. I’m on the site, and it’s bookmarked now. Voyeuristic viral marketing at it’s best. If you’re thinking this is Photoshop at its best, check out Mad Mariner’s post claiming authenticity.

Thanks to Denise Howell for calling my attention to this one. I’m going to stop looking now. Really, I am.

1. Alani Golanski Brooklyn, NY

2. Lawrence Rogak Oceanside, NY

3. Mark Vincent Kaplan Los Angeles, CA
4. Craig Kennedy Vancouver, WA

5. Elizabeth Rankin Powell Tacoma, WA

6. Blair Berk Los Angeles, CA
7. Roni Deutch North Highlands, CA

8. Una Lauricia Cleveland, OH
9. Sharon Chirichillo Olympia, WA

10. John Browne Seattle, WA

I got an email early this morning notifying me that one of my close childhood friends has volunteered for a 12 month tour in Iraq as an Army JAG Corps Attorney.

Whatever you may think of the war, please remember the young lawyers who have chosen a very different path and volunteered to put themselves in harm’s way to serve the legal needs of our servicemen and women.

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.