Thanks to all the folks who turned out for the 2nd Seattle Law Blogger Meetup. Here are some tips I learned from my fellow law bloggers:

• China Law Blog offered that writing a Blawg Review could expose you to legal bloggers outside your niche
• Employment Law Blog noted that though her blog is not regularly updated, potential clients regularly contact her for her expertise based on older posts
• Twitter is the platform of choice for Michael Rice and Randall Moeller
• Seattle Trademark Lawyer proposed using Twitter as a “microblog” for stories that he does not want to write a full- length blog post

Terrific post from Cordell Parvin about the growing importance of website bios. While Parvin notes that he used to hate the annual updating of his bio, he now recognizes the importance of fleshing out one’s online identity in an age when an increasing number of consumers of legal services are seeking help online.

Parvin’s post has a lot of great tips for lawyers regarding presenting themselves in the best light, our favorite being the advice to not have the website photos “taken after the cocktail party at the firm retreat.” With respect to photos, we would also emphasize the importance of displaying photos on all of one’s online profiles, whether it’s a law firm website, Avvo profile, LinkedIn, Facebook, etc. Lawyer profiles with photos on Avvo, for example, are clicked on over seven times more often than profiles lacking a photo. Just don’t make it the kind of photo that people click on out of morbid curiousity!

One old truism of advertising is that “long copy sells.” The idea is that pitches that include more detail will convert better than those that only provide high-level information. This truth of this adage gains more and more credence as the cost of a good or service increases (which is obviously true in spades for legal services). The more info you can provide a potential client about your background, your expertise and your approach, the better-positioned you will be to gain that client.

The good news is that even as people flock to the web to research legal services, the cost for a lawyer to present a comprehensive profile, complete with “long copy” in the form of comprehensive background info, downloadable documents, case highlights and video has come way down. You can build out such a profile on Avvo and the social networking sites for free (here’s a great example that incorporates video). Even the cost and hassle of producing a professional video spot has dropped.

Whether its your next client, employer, or partner - you never know when someone is going to be looking you up online. With the resources available today, there’s no excuse to not put your best foot forward.

The Supreme Court today further reduced the punitive damages against Exxon for the Valdez spill. The initial $5 billion judgment against Exxon has now been reduced to just over $1 billion, making attorney Walter Dellinger a $4 billion JD-brandishing superhero to big oil. Exxon profits were just under $4 billion per month in the first quarter of 2008.

1. Alec Rose, Santa Monica, CA

2. Mark Vincent Kaplan, Los Angeles, CA

3. William Head, Atlanta, GA

4. Roni Deutch, North Highlands, CA

5. Melanie L Bossie,
Phoenix, AZ

6. Okorie Okorocham, Los Angeles, CA

7. Thuong-Tri Nguyen, Renton, WA

8. Jonathan Dichter, Bothell, WA

9. David Leibowitz, Waukegan, IL

10. Jon Scott Fox, Bellevue, WA

1. Since when did wearing underwear become dangerous? Macrida Patterson, who is suing Victoria’s Secret, says she was hurt by a defective “low rise v-string” last May when a rhinestone came lose from the panties and hit her in the eye. Lawyer Jason Buccat, of the L.A. firm, Willoughby & Associates, said that a “design problem caused the decorative piece to come loose and strike Patterson in the eye, causing damage to her cornea.”

2. Every rose has it’s thorn… 80’s hair-band, Poison, has filed a lawsuit against Capitol Records for consistently not paying them royalties throughout their monumental careers. Lawyers Mark Passin and Jonathan Stern, of the Santa Monica firm Dreier Stein Kahan Browne Woods George, are representing Bret Michaels and the gang with their sad sad song.

3. It’s not a small world after all… Apparently a beard and turban don’’t really fly if you want to work at Disney World. Sukhbir Channa, a practicing Sikh, was removed from his position in the parade for not having the “Disney look”. With the help of his lawyer, Matt Sarelson, he is suing for “at least $1 million and that the court enjoin Disney from discriminating against Sikh employees and prospective employees.”

Some major stories in the blogosphere:

• Sonic Trial Blog scores an interview with the City of Seattle’s lawyer Paul Lawrence
• Slate’s Hot Document summarizes the Bill Murray/Jennifer Butler Murray prenuptial agreement and has it in its entirety
• WSJ Law Blog covers a new trend “dating terms of engagement”: this one is between Mark Zuckerberg and his girlfriend Priscilla Chan and it stipulates, “One date per week, a minimum of a hundred minutes of alone time, not in his apartment and definitely not at Facebook.”
• Lori Drew, the worst person on the internet plead not guilty in MySpace suicide case
• What’s the Matter With Kansas?  Lawyers, Guns and Money explains, sourcing the New York Times
• RIAA’s strategy may really boil down to “be sleazy, intimidate, then profit”
• Florida Bar recommends that Jack Thompson be disbarred for 10 years (Gamepolitics has the sanctions hearing transcript)

Oh and it’s sunny in Seattle

We’ve already been scooped by Seattle Trademark Lawyer, but all local legal bloggers are invited to a meetup at Avvo’s offices. Please RSVP if you are able to make it.

Where: Avvo’s offices on the 3rd Floor at 217 Pine Street (between 2nd & 3rd Avenue) in Downtown Seattle

When: Thursday, June 26 from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m.

What: Legal Blogger Meetup - proposed agenda to include

• What have you done to attract more readers?
• What widgets or other features have made your blog more functional?
• What resources do you consult when trying to improve your blog?
• What are your strategies in developing new content?
• What is your favorite blog (ok, other than your own), and why?

Will there be treats?

• Why, yes - beer, wine & sushi maki

1. The rock band Motley Crüe is suing their former manager for swindling them out of money behind their backs. Crüe is represented by lawyers Louis Miller and A. Sasha Frid of the Los Angeles firm Miller Barondess, LLP. The band seeks unspecified damages and requests that Stein has no right to any commissions from their work. Stein should know better… nobody messes with a hair band.

2. Fighter in fishnets? The stripper that sued Oscer De La Hoya has dismissed her claim. Milana Dravnel (represented by Salvatore Strazzullo) was seeking $25 million for slander. She claimed that De La Hoya presured her to “recant the legitimacy of photos she allegedly took of the boxer in fishnet stockings, high heels and other women’s garb”. Dravnel dismissed the case after an expert assessed the photos as “doctored”. De La Hoy’s attorney, Judd Burstein, had this to say: “She was facing destruction on a major scale. She wisely chose to dismiss.”

3. Colorado lawyer, Harvey Steinberg, is dealing with an interesting case this week. He represents Roman Catholic priest who had been accused of jogging naked at a high school track. Father Robert Whipkey was found guilty of indecent exposure. The officer who arrested him said his excuse was “He said that he didn’t like to wear any clothes because he sweats profusely.” That seems like a good reason to stip and go for a run.

One interesting side note to Avvo’s application to the Illinois Supreme Court for attorney records involved our use of counsel. Working for a pre-revenue start-up, I generally do all of Avvo’s public records request work myself, rather than spending money on outside counsel.

In Illinois, however, I needed some help understanding the court’s perspective and the puzzling decision by the ARDC to not release a list of names of attorneys. I also needed someone with deep familiarity with the Illinois Supreme Court and the process for filing an application like ours.

The Illinois Supreme Court

Unfortunately, most of the lawyers I know are in Seattle, San Francisco or New York. While I know a couple of M&A lawyers at Sidley & Austin in Chicago (including the indefatiguable Bill DeCarlo, who I’ve done several telecom deals with), I don’t know any Illinois appellate lawyers. What to do? I could try to get a referral from one of the lawyers I know, but that would take time, and wouldn’t necessarily bear fruit. I could check Martindale Hubbell, but I didn’t even use that 10 years ago when it was the only directory option - it’s just not detailed enough.

So I used Avvo - we ought to eat our own cooking, right? A quick search of Avvo turned up 531 appellate lawyers in Illinois; near the top of the list was Steve Pflaum, a partner at McDermott Will & Emery in Chicago. A quick check on his profile revealed that Steve knows the Supreme Court inside and out, has worked with the ARDC and has served on the Supreme Court’s Professional Responsibility Committee. In short, exactly the background I was looking for.

Steve didn’t expect that claiming his Avvo profile would lead to a parade of consumers seeking him out; he did so more as a matter of interest and online reputation management. However, as my experience shows, there’s no reason Avvo can’t be a resource for in-house counsel as well - and a means for even large firm attorneys to present themselves to potential corporate clients.

Back in March, Avvo successfully petitioned the New Jersey Supreme Court to obtain the release of licensing data for all New Jersey attorneys. We’re now making a similar request of the Illinois Supreme Court, where that state’s attorney-regulating body (the Illinois Attorney Registration and Disciplinary Commission) has refused to release licensing and sanctions data for Illinois attorneys.

Our issues with Illinois illustrate the lack of transparency that continues to beset the legal industry. The ARDC has specific guidelines providing that it can release its “Master Roll” of attorneys to courts, local bar associations and continuing legal education service providers. The ARDC has apparently decided that this is the limit of its obligation to provide this information in a complete form to the public, and that Avvo, as a commercial enterprise not based in Illinois, is not entitled to the records.

What’s curious is that this isn’t a question of confidentiality. The information Avvo wants is freely available on the ARDC website, but there’s a catch -you’ve got to know the name of an attorney to do a search. In this way, the ARDC is making the information public, but in a functionally obscure way. A consumer can check up on an attorney they are thinking of hiring, but they can’t search the ARDC database for an attorney.

Of course, we’ve got a little internet and data mining expertise here at Avvo, so we were able to access most of the attorney records in the ARDC site and include Illinois as one of the 10 jurisdictions covered by our June, 2007 launch. However, while we’re confident we’ve been able to extract data for 95-99% of all Illinois attorneys, we know we haven’t gotten all of them. In fact, several Illinois attorneys have proactively reached out to us and asked why they did not have profiles on Avvo. The bottom line is that there is no way we can offer consumers and lawyers a complete view of Illinois lawyers as long as we have to run this kind of data extraction program every time we update records.

So why would the ARDC oppose lifting the functional obscurity from data that it already makes public? It could be that the ARDC feels like the specific guidelines provided by the Supreme Court for the release of the Master Roll limit it from providing the data directly to Avvo. It could also be that the ARDC finds it anathema to provide this data to a for-profit business that is not a CLE provider. You would think that the ARDC, which counts among its principal missions the discipline of wayward lawyers, would welcome with open arms Avvo’s offer to publicize ARDC disciplinary decisions. Instead, we’re mired in the question of whether Avvo should have the key - a simple list of names - with which to unlock the data the ARDC already makes public.

Ultimately, the ARDC is playing off the same out-of-date rulebook we’ve encountered in places like New Jersey - the mindset that says the attorney regulators and lawyers should control how much information is available to consumers. We’ve seen these walls come down in industries from travel to real estate - remember when the travel agent would key furiously into a propreitary machine to produce three potential travel itineraries, or MLS data could only be accessed by a realtor? Avvo is trying to bring that same level of access to the legal profession. While I hope entanglements like this will be few and far between, we won’t hesitate to keep fighting them in an effort to bring consumers a comprehensive picture of the legal community.

Josh