Digging in the Garden (State)
Here at Avvo, we have been getting a fair number of inquiries regarding the AP story that broke yesterday reporting our difficulties in getting lawyer records from New Jersey. For those that are interested, our General Counsel, Josh King, is putting together a diary of sorts regarding our dealings with New Jersey to date. The first installment is ready to go and, although based in reality, the story is just outlandish enough to make for good reading. Josh’s plan is to keep releasing installments until we reach some level of rational interaction with New Jersey.
As a preamble to all of this, I want to say that we are not trying to poke a stick in New Jersey’s regulatory eye. That being said, we are completely baffled regarding New Jersey’s behavior to date. The information we are requesting is already published in book and disc form (costing you $78 + tax and shipping by the way) by a company called Lawyers Diary, based in New Jersey. If this information is so confidential or otherwise difficult to produce, then why does New Jersey only distribute it through the very expensive Lawyers Diary year after year? Wouldn’t New Jersey want to make that information widely available for consumers for free? Yes, one can call the New Jersey clerk of court and get any information regarding a single attorney; but that’s not very helpful if, like all of those going to the Yellow Pages, you don’t have any attorney’s name.
We look forward to New Jersey addressing some of these inconsistencies, and I personally look forward to Josh’s reporting on it all. In the end, if New Jersey and Avvo are truly of like mind in helping consumers get the information and guidance they need to choose the right lawyer, then this should all take care of itself pretty quickly.
Josh, take it away . . .
Mark
