Rank Justice

If you’ve ever shopped for books or music online, there is a pretty fair chance you consulted a consumer review page to see how buyers graded their purchase. The rankings and comments tend to range from the inane to the insightful, and like most subjective evaluations, the truth almost always lies somewhere in the middle.

One company, Seattle-based Avvo (www.avvo.com), is seeking to bring this same business model to the legal profession, instituting an online grading system for attorneys across the United States replete with client and peer comments than can be viewed for free by anyone. And to awaken the legal profession out of its Middle Ages slumber, Avvo has even instituted a numerical ranking system, assigning each lawyer a score from 1 to 10.

In what should come as a surprise to no one, some lawyers were not exactly thrilled to see a score befitting another bad Weezer album next to their name on Avvo. Just nine days after Avvo was launched, a group of disgruntled lawyers who received less than glowing scores immediately filed a class-action site to shut Avvo down as some sort of a public nuisance, claiming that it was misleading, inaccurate and full of libelous crap. Mercifully, the suit was tossed.

Last week, our esteemed third branch of government, the Illinois Supreme Court, stepped into the fray and foiled Avvo’s plans to build an Illinois database of attorneys. The Court denied a petition filed by Avvo to obtain a master list of attorneys licensed to practice in Illinois, relying on its own 28 year-old policy against dissemination of the list for “commercial purposes.”

Well, it turns out that, since the Court instituted this “policy,” we developed something called the internet, and all sorts of basic attorney information is available free of charge from the Attorney Registration and Disciplinary Commission (ARDC), an agency of the Supreme Court itself. In other words, Avvo merely sought what the ARDC website provides, albeit in a much more usable, compiled format. Nothing secret or proprietary, just basic attorney data. Avvo’s general counsel, Josh King, even told me by e-mail that Avvo “would certainly pay a reasonable fee for the master [attorney] list.”

But, alas, our Supeme Court said it must be kept secret. The notion that the Court can rely on a policy to keep an attorney list secret is so laughable that it does not merit discussion. What motivated the Court is not secrecy, but misplaced paternalism. Simply put, the Supreme Court does not think the average member of the public is intelligent enough to judge Avvo’s content on its own merits.

Avvo may or may not be a helpful service for the public, but that is beside the point. It should not fail because our highest Court happens to think Avvo’s site may lead to erroneous rankings for members of the Bar. Those are qualitative judgments that each consumer must make. The real downside to the Court’s misguided decision is that it will hurt those who most need a reliable source to find basic information on lawyers. Well-to-do individuals and businesses will almost always rely on referrals or an existing network of contacts to find an attorney.

But for someone with little experience in dealing with lawyers, there simply aren’t many resources to find a professional who is the right fit. Avvo at least tries to provide them with an information portal to get started in an easy-to-use, consumer-oriented format. The Court is doing the average member of the public a disservice by insulating its lawyers from objective reviews and rankings. And if a lawyer thinks his ranking sucks, then it takes all of about 15 minutes to jump on the computer and update a profile with helpful information that will almost certainly boost an attorney’s score. Shame on any attorney who can’t see the obvious marketing opportunity here.

And speaking of lawyer rankings, despite what the ARDC and others like it have said about Avvo, they are nothing new in the legal field. They just haven’t been delivered in the way Avvo does it, where the focus is on the consumer. As someone who has practiced law in Illinois for 11 years, I regret to report that my mailbox is filled with “Super Lawyer” magazines, “Best Lawyers in America” publications, and an array of “Who’s Who” rankings on top lawyers in particular fields. Avvo cannot possibly be any worse than these supercilious self-indulgent tomes, and in the process it might just give a client the opportunity to register an opinion about a lawyer for others to see. Imagine how nice it would be if the legal profession for once actually decided that it is the client who really matters.