Category: Avvo

In early April, I left Avvo. It’s been 10 years; it’s time for something new. What that is yet . . . I don’t know. Summer is glorious in the Pacific Northwest; I’d love to take some serious time off and enjoy it with my family and friends.

So I don’t know how much more I’ll be writing here. I suspect, however, that I will stay involved in efforts to improve our legal system, regardless of where my work takes me. So with that adieu, I leave you with a brief wish list of legal reforms:

• Change to “Principles-Based” Regulation.  The American system of attorney regulation is rules-based: read the rules, comply with the rules. Such a system that has the advantage of clarity, but it’s a poor system for attorneys. It’s brittle. It’s non-responsive to changes in the environment. It focuses on detail (and “creative compliance”) at the expense of the purpose underlying each rule. And it makes innovation hard. Why not adopt the example of our cousins in the UK and move to a system of principles-based regulation? Let’s re-write the Model Rules to focus on desired outcomes, rather than rigid rules, and let attorneys and firms figure out the best ways to achieve those outcomes. We might be surprised the extent to which such a system would elevate the profession to a place where the focus is back on achieving the best outcomes for clients, rather than mere “compliance.”

• Allow Non-Lawyer Ownership of Law Firms. Law firms are starved of investment – and the innovative thinking that would happen if smart non-lawyers could be invested in the success of those firms – by the flat-out bans on non-lawyer investment in, and ownership of, law firms.  Enough with the hand-wringing about the “uniqueness of the profession” and “corporate profiteering.” Law is already a business, and we are deluding ourselves if we think that attorneys are immune from the pressures of the bottom line. It would be easy to build client protection measures into such a system. And let’s be honest: well-run corporate businesses, with transparent practices and high levels of accessibility, would provide better, more predictable, more responsive, and less conflicted service than most lawyers and law firms right out of the gate.

• Scale Back the Definition of “The Practice of Law.” Along with allowing non-lawyer ownership of law firms, we should dispense with the field-grabbing maneuver of claiming that everything remotely “legal” is “the practice of law,” and thus can only be handled by licensed attorneys. Let lawyers practice at the top of their licenses, and let everyone else – so long as they aren’t “holding out” as attorneys – be free to dispense legal advice, even to paying customers. There’s a decent chance the Supreme Court will dictate this result within the next few years anyway,[ref]There is a very good argument that telling non-lawyers they are barred from giving legal advice violates the First Amendment, and cases – including this one – challenging limitations on “paid professional speech” are working their way through the courts.[/ref] so some enterprising Bar should just get out in front of this sea change that’s coming.[ref]Also worth noting: the legal monopoly in the UK doesn’t include legal advice; yet things seem to be working tolerably well there.[/ref]

• Fix Multi-Jurisdictional Practice. My great-grandfather was a lawyer in Indiana. He abruptly moved his family to Tulsa in 1921, arriving just as race riots roiled that city. He had to start his practice over in a new state, but state-based attorney licensing made sense at that time – and certainly up to, and beyond, his retirement decades later. Most attorneys, including great-granddad, worked in wide-ranging, intensely local practices. But in modern society, it’s the rare lawyer who isn’t focused on a narrow area of law. Those narrow areas often span multiple geographies. So why persist in the fiction that general facility with a state’s law – as tested on a single occasion – is a necessary prerequisite to practice law in that state? Why not have admission at the national level, handle discipline at the state level, and control – via more frequent and specific tests – admission to practice before local courts? Doing so would far better police the point where failure to understand the local rules can do the most harm to clients (representation in court), while freeing lawyers (and the clients they would serve) from the arbitrariness of state MJP restrictions.

• Create Meaningful Regulatory Processes.  Administrative agencies drive a gigantic body of the law – just look at the Code of Federal Regulations.  Non-legislative in nature, administrative rules are nonetheless adopted under a well-developed body of processes and norms.  While this process differs slightly from agency to agency, it is marked by transparency, opportunity for public comment, and responsiveness.  Notices of Proposed Rulemaking are promulgated, and orders imposing new or amended rules offer detailed descriptions of how any serious comments received were addressed. Nothing of the type pertains in lawyer regulatory processes. Supreme Courts treat lawyer regulation as just another adversary process – often freezing non-lawyers out. Publicity, notice, and transparency? Typically non-existent. And even the most well-intentioned regulators inevitably get hung up on a decision-making process that gives interested market participants (who often have the scantest sense of their regulatory obligations) veto power.  If the legal industry is going to maintain self-regulation, it needs to start doing so in a much more serious and neutral fashion.

Many lawyers would regard these as radical changes. But they really aren’t: they are a mix of approaches proven elsewhere and straightforward fixes for obvious regulatory failings. Unfortunately, our profession strongly prefers incremental approaches to anything that smells of “change” – that’s one reason we’ve got the creaky assemblage of Rules of Professional Conduct lawyers are saddled with. If the profession is to adapt and best serve the public, it’s got to do more than just tidy things around the edges. I offer my “wish list” as a modest starting point for that discussion.

I recently returned from lovely Asheville, North Carolina, where the North Carolina State Bar moved to adopt an ethics opinion favorable to Avvo Legal Services. The Bar also proposed changes to the fee-sharing and trust account rules to specify that mechanical-but-not-client-impacting payments to intermediaries (the bugaboo of too many regulators) are not prohibited under the Rules of Professional Conduct.

The North Carolina EO and Rule Changes – which are moving forward for final comments and, one hopes, adoption – are the culmination of what has been a model process. The Bar appointed a subcommittee to address the issue, and that group took its time. It held numerous meetings, and got input from all corners to understand the issues. The subcommittee also brought to bear a deep understanding of both the public-protection purpose of the Rules, and the constitutional constraints which govern them.

And then there’s the New York State Bar Association.

The NYSBA announced today that it has issued an ethics opinion finding that Avvo Legal Services violates New York’s rules of professional conduct – specifically, the prohibition against lawyers paying third parties to recommend them.

Unlike the North Carolina State Bar, the NYSBA is a voluntary, non-regulatory legal trade association. It opinions are purely advisory. But New York is a big and influential state, and lawyers are sure to have questions about this opinion. And while the NYSBA didn’t run a transparent and public process like North Carolina’s, it did – to its credit – actually take the time to understand how Avvo Legal Services works.

But they still came to the wrong conclusion.

As in most states, the New York Rules of Professional Conduct prohibits lawyers from paying for “recommendations.” The NYSBA opinion finds that attorneys participating in Avvo Legal Services are making “improper payment for a recommendation in violation of Rule 7.2(a).” Yet in reaching this conclusion, the NYSBA stretches the term “recommendation” far beyond its permissible bounds.

As I am constantly going on about, there are First Amendment limitations on the Rules of Professional Conduct. Attorneys have a right to express themselves, and the public has a right to access information about legal services. What this means in practice is that the Rules can’t mean whatever the regulators want them to mean. It means that the Rules can’t be interpreted to broadly gather in anything that might arguably sound like it could “fit” under the rules.

More specifically, attorney advertising restrictions must:

• Materially advance important state interests, and
• Do so in a narrow fashion.

That’s not my opinion; it’s the law.

The NYSBA opinion doesn’t grapple with these obvious Constitutional guardrails. Instead, it basically says:

“Hey, if you squint hard enough, and add together Avvo’s objective system of lawyer ratings plus some marketing statements Avvo uses to refer to lawyers in general, that looks kinda like a “recommendation” of every participating lawyer.”

That’s far, far too broad. To survive First Amendment scrutiny, a prohibition on recommendations must be narrowly limited to those recommendations that actually mislead the public. And the NYSBA opinion acknowledges this in passing, noting its earlier Opinion 799, which found that the “recommendation” line is crossed when the referrer “purports to recommend a particular lawyer or lawyers based on an analysis of the potential client’s problem.”

This is getting at the issue, because such a recommendation – particularly in the absence of transparency and consumer choice – can lead the consumer to believe they are being sent to the best possible attorney for their legal problem, when in fact they are being sent to the one paying the most money.

But instead, the opinion treats “recommendation” as a broad-ranging term into which anything bearing a passing resemblance can fit. That’s not a stand that will survive its first encounter with judicial review.

And this is yet more evidence of a far too common pattern: applying the prophylactic, overly-cautious ethics opinion approach to rules where the Constitution dictates a much lighter hand. It’s a continuation of a decades-long habit of chilling lawyer speech, to the detriment of consumers and lawyers alike.

Why is it bad when bars don’t pay attention to the first amendment limitations on their ability to regulate? Because it leads attorneys to extrapolate into wildly limiting restrictions on the rights of attorneys to communicate.

To whit, this three-part series in the ABA GP Solo eReport, “Attorney Rating Systems: Should You Play?” In the series (or at least the first two parts; the third part comes out in August), attorney Stacey Romberg concludes that “it is difficult to imagine” how Avvo could meet the standard for attorney use of the Avvo rating and profile under ethics opinions issued by Utah and Washington.[ref]I wrote about the Washington ethics opinion earlier this year.[/ref]

But it’s not that difficult.

First of all, the states don’t have unfettered discretion to regulate how attorneys communicate. It’s fine for them to say that they won’t allow attorneys to participate in pay-to-play or other forms of ratings advertising that deceives consumers. But it’s quite another to fret, as Romberg does, that vague terms like these cut against attorneys using ratings:

“the lawyer ensures that the methodology or process used to determine the rating is fully disclosed and explained using plain language and is conveniently available to the public” [Utah] or

“If Lawyer determines that the website’s numeric and/or descriptive ratings of lawyers are not based upon the lawyer’s performance or merit and the website does not disclose how the ratings are calculated, then the lawyer must not participate in the website.” [Washington]

As I rail on, repeatedly, guidance like this from state bars can’t be read expansively. It must be read narrowly; that’s required by the First Amendment, even for commercial speech.

So this language from the state bars? Read it as prohibiting communications that are actually deceptive – like ratings that are paid for or made up (or where there is no way for consumers to tell if the rating is paid for or fictional). But it doesn’t create any uncertainty, whatsoever, about legitimate ratings such as those published by Avvo (or Superlawyers, Martindale-Hubble, Best Lawyers, or Chambers for that matter).

To emphasize: despite the handwringing about whether any such sites, including Avvo, provide adequate information about how ratings are calculated, we all provide more than enough. Why? Because the only test of whether the information is “fully disclosed” or displayed “conveniently” enough is that of consumer deception. Is there something about the rating system that’s going to deceive consumers into thinking it’s something it’s not? No? Than stop worrying about it.