July 8th, 2008 by Josh King, VP of Business Development and General Counsel

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I received the Illinois Attorney Registration and Disciplinary Commission’s response to Avvo’s Illinois Supreme Court petition yesterday. Although I had hoped that the ARDC would simply ask the court for guidance in dealing with the apparent disagreement between public records law and the ARDC’s 28-year-old guidelines for providing attorney records, the ARDC went to some lengths to defend its guidelines and take issue with what Avvo is doing. I’m not entirely sure why – the guidelines in question have survived both the advent of the internet and the explosion of openness in most state open records laws, so there surely would be no shame in inquiring whether the policy is still relevant, let alone whether it complies with the current state of Illinois law on public access to judicial records.

The guidelines in question, you see, generally prohibit the dissemination of the Attorney Roll to non-Illinois entities or for most commercial uses (for-profit Illinois CLE providers are exempt). Putting aside the only-for-Illinois portion of the guidelines (a restriction that surely doesn’t meet the standards of the federal Constitution’s Privileges and Immunities clause), the ARDC has focused on Avvo’s status as a commercial entity and Avvo’s use of the attorney records. Along the way, the ARDC has attempted to understand how Avvo works. Unfortunately, it hasn’t done so via the lens of the consumer. So let’s clear up some misconceptions the folks in Springfield hold:

Avvo Claimed Profiles: In an effort to “understand and advise the court on the nature of Avvo’s service,” the ARDC searched Avvo for the names of 10 specific Illinois attorneys, 5 of whom were government officials or lawyers. Unsurprisingly, none of them had claimed profiles. What’s frustrating about this type of “name” search is that it is only an ancillary way of using Avvo. The primary benefit of Avvo is that it allows a consumer to conduct a search by geography and type of problem rather than by lawyer name. If the ARDC wants to understand how Avvo works for a consumer, it should search for, say, Chicago bankruptcy lawyers. It should also come as no surprise that Avvo doesn’t spend its data mining resources on filling out the backgrounds of government lawyers, as consumers aren’t typically looking to hire state’s counsel.

Number of Illinois Lawyers on Avvo: I have estimated that Avvo has profiles for 95-99% of licensed Illinois attorneys, but that we (and consumers, and at least some number of lawyers in Illinois) want to make sure Avvo contains a complete record of Illinois attorneys. In its filing, the ARDC points out that a search of IL lawyers on Avvo only yields 66,000 results when the ARDC’s records show 85,000 licensed attorneys. I’m at a loss to understand how this line of argument is relevant to the issues at hand, but I must dispel the impression it leaves that Avvo has been less-than-diligent in the task of extracting what it can from the ARDC’s public website.

First of the all, the ARDC is again working from the mindset of the lawyer, not the consumer. Avvo’s search results are based on geographic presence, not state of licensing, so the 66,000 lawyers we show in Illinois are those with a business address in the state, regardless of the state that licensed them. It’s a safe bet, of course, that the vast majority of those 66,000 lawyers are licensed in Illinois. However, attorneys with Illinois addresses who are licensed in more than one state – and who haven’t claimed their Avvo profiles – will have multiple profiles that show up in an Illinois search, somewhat inflating the actual number of individual attorneys we have records for. So how many of the ARDC’s 85,000 lawyers are in resident in Illinois? According to ARDC records, 61,500. Now, I’m not sure of the exact number of multiple profiles we have in IL, but with 66,000 Avvo profiles in IL against the ARDC’s record of 61,500 Illinois-licensed lawyers resident in-state, I’m sticking with my estimate that we have profiles for 95-99% of IL lawyers.

As a side note, Avvo’s 66,000 number also doesn’t include deceased, disbarred, inactive or judicial profiles, as consumers aren’t looking to hire such lawyers. However, you can find these profiles when searching by name (e.g., Abraham Lincoln and Barack Obama).

Commercial Use: First of all, Avvo may be a commercial entity (i.e., ultimately interested in making money), but our use of the data is not commercial – we’re not selling it; we’re trying to make attorney licensing data as widely available as possible so consumers have more options and guidance in choosing a lawyer. Consumers can check a lawyer’s name on the ARDC website, but they can’t use it to find a lawyer in the first place. Avvo is using the data in a way that makes it far more accessible and useful to Illinois consumers.

Furthermore, even if the use were commercial, what of it? All sorts of public records are used for commercial purposes data from tax records to court decisions is aggregated and often flatly sold for commercial gain. There is nothing about attorney licensing and disciplinary records that makes them worthy of more protection than the myriad categories of public records already being used for commercial purposes.

Ultimately, the public is served by freer access to public records. Avvo’s is but one of the many novel uses that open access and the broad dissemination and aggregation offered by the internet make possible. We hope that the Illinois Supreme Court sees its way clear to finding that these public records should be freely accessible.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 8th, 2008 at 11:02 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.