(To illustrate the difficulties consumers face in accessing public records on attorney licensing, we are providing an ongoing account of Avvo’s attempt to obtain attorney licensing information from the state of New Jersey. See Part 1 and Part 2)

Having received no response to my December 20 letter , I wrote a follow-up on January 7, 2008.

After waiting a week with no response to this latest missive, I resorted to a tactic familiar to over-eager job-seekers everywhere – I placed a call to the Clerk’s office every day, asking to speak directly with Mr. Townsend. Finally, on January 18, I spoke with him for the first time.

In our conversation, I asked Mr. Townsend how a consumer in New Jersey could check and see if their attorney was in good standing or had any disciplinary records. He said they could call the clerk’s office, and the data would be looked up, but that the system didn’t work well.

What does this mean? It means New Jersey either has a bad system for accessing the data or the data is somehow corrupt (or both). The former shouldn’t be a problem for public access; the latter is a BIG problem, and needs to be solved. However, I don’t know which it is, and neither does Mr. Townsend. He says his technical people told him that the data could not be provided – and that was good enough for him.

Again, I pressed him for a call between our engineering staff. Anyone who has worked around computer technology knows that bringing more perspectives to a problem can often bring solutions to light that weren’t obvious when only one set of eyes was looking at it. Mr. Townsend refused, and hung up on me, apparently viewing my insistence on the technical call as tantamount to calling him a liar.

After this call, I sent a letter back to Mr. Townsend on the afternoon of January 18, reassuring him that I wasn’t impugning his credibility but that I felt the call was necessary to assess the technical limitations to providing the data:

“New Jersey has very open rules with respect to access and public records, and we need to understand whether the Court’s unwillingness to provide the data we seek is driven by fundamental corruption of the data, limitations in your data retrieval system, or a policy that the underlying data will not be provided to the public at this time irregardless.”

I closed by reiterating my request for the technical call and noting that we’d need to take legal action to get these public records if the Court didn’t cooperate.

On February 4, 2008, I received a letter from Mr. Townsend explaining the process for seeking review of his decision. Among other requirements, I needed to submit 10 copies of the pleading and adhere to certain font limitations. The court would make its determination “in due course.”

Next up: The ironic story of the New Jersey Supreme Court’s current efforts to greatly expand public access to its records – unless they relate to attorneys or judges.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 28th, 2008 at 9:31 am by Josh King, VP of Business Development and General Counsel and is filed under Josh King 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.