The Illinois Supreme Court, in a one-line ruling, rejected Avvo’s application for the Illinois Master Roll of attorneys. We are, as you might expect, surprised and disappointed in this outcome. Although we have the vast majority of Illinois lawyer records already, we were hoping that, with the ARDC’s cooperation, we could offer Illinois consumers and attorneys the complete picture of all Illinois licensed attorneys.

Nonetheless, we respect the court’s decision, and we’ll go on providing the service in Illinois in its current form. If you are an Illinois lawyer and you can’t find your profile on Avvo drop us a note and we will manually create it. Just be sure to give us your name, as that’s the only way we can get the info from the ARDC

Great support in the Madison & St. Clair (IL) Record newspapers for Avvo’s petition to the Illinois Supreme Court for attorney licensing and disciplinary records. From the editorial:

“Giving the list to Avvo would “lead to similar requests for this information from… other entities that wish to provide information regarding attorneys to the general public,” wrote ARDC attorney Rosalyn Kaplan in a brief opposing the company’s request.

And that’s supposed to be a bad thing?”

I was wondering the same thing. From the looks of the poll on the editorial page, over two-thirds of readers agree that the ARDC should release the information to Avvo.

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.

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.

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

Two years ago, when Barry Bonds was in the throes of the BALCO investigation, a quirky thing happened in the ESPN fantasy baseball league I participate in: The league website stopped referring to “Barry Bonds”, substituting instead the nomiker “San Francisco OF.” It turns out that ESPN pays Major League Baseball a licensing fee to use the names of major league players; the league was in a dispute with Bonds, and one side or the other insisted that his name not be associated with MLB for a time.

The particulars aren’t important. What is amazing is that MLB felt like it had the right to license the player’s names, and fantasy baseball league operators like ESPN actually went along with the licensing scheme. But not all of them did - a smallish outfit in St. Louis challenged the licensing deal and won in court. MLB pushed the case all the way to the Supreme Court - which just denied cert, letting the lower court victories for fantasy baseball stand. Good news for baseball fans and advocates of sensible IP rights everywhere.

Having done my share of M&A work, I’m a big fan of Steven Davidoff’s “Deal Professor” column in the NY Times Dealbook. His recent bit of informed speculation about the nature of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s rights viz-a-viz his VC backers is a great high-level illustration of some of the not-immediately-obvious issues that founders need to consider when considering venture capital investment.

On a lighter note than yesterday’s post about the rating of state supreme courts, I’ve got to pass along this effort to rank the 50 worst album covers of all time. Sure, the approach may be just a little less scientific, but these examples of album cover art(?) are not to be missed.

Those who recall Avvo’s launch, nearly one year ago, will no doubt remember the chorus of lawyers aghast that we would dare to rate members of the legal profession. We hear little of that these days, as our approach has become accepted - if not always welcomed - within the legal community.

In the spirit of those appalled that legal practitioners could be rated, I was amused to come across this University of Chicago Law School paper that sets forth a methodology for ranking state supreme courts (and compares it with the surprising number of other recent rankings of such courts).

Quelle horreur - How can one possibly rank the complex work undertaken by these lofty collectives of jurists? Easy, if you’re a bunch of law and econ guys: Create a ranking algorithm based on productivity (number of opinions published), influence (on other courts and academia) and independence (from partisan pressures).

Interestingly, the authors had this to say about the utility of rankings:

“The alternative to rankings is, as a practical matter, virtually no information, and public institutions that are not carefully monitored and evaluated will rarely have strong incentives to perform well. Rankings, however imperfect, serve an important information-forcing function. Institutions that do poorly on rankings should have the burden of coming forth with an explanation for their performance; but if the explanation is plausible, then the ranking should be discounted.”

That’s lot like how we think about the Avvo Rating - a good place to start one’s search for a lawyer, but not the end-all-be-all in making the decision.

So how did the states do? Our authors’ top 10:

Arkansas
California
North Dakota
Montana
Ohio
Georgia
Mississippi
Massachusetts
Rhode Island
New York

Sad to see our Washington court, which finished no worse than seventh in the other three rankings, didn’t make the list. Read the paper for the in-depth discussion of why using an unbiased algorithm provides a more balanced picture than the traditional ratings, which typically focused on only one of the algorithm’s three factors.