New Study: A Law Firm Can Be Highly Rated and Name No Lawyer at All
Every guide to hiring a lawyer ends the same way: look the attorney up in your state's register. Following that advice needs two things to be true at once, and we measured how often each of them holds across the 217 firms in this directory. The check completed on 51 of them.
The check everyone recommends
Search for how to tell whether a law firm is legitimate and every answer says the same thing. Take the attorney's name, put it into your state bar's lookup, and read what comes back: active or not, admitted when, disciplined ever.
It is good advice. It is free, it takes a minute, and the register is a better answer than anything a directory could write. What none of that advice mentions is that the check needs two things before it can run at all.
Somebody has to publish a name. And the state has to publish a register that answers.
We run both checks on every firm we list, as eligibility gates G1 and G2 of the certification methodology. This is what happened when we ran them across 217 firms in 9 markets and 7 states.
Who these firms name
161 firms publish at least one attorney on a page our crawler could read, 1,832 lawyers in total. 56 publish none we could find.
What we found when we went looking for a name, across 217 firms
- 161Attorneys named on a page we could read74% of firms
- 9A roster page, but no name we could read4% of firms
- 5Site refuses our crawler2% of firms
- 42No roster page and no name19% of firms
The last group is the finding and the second and third groups are ours, so they are counted apart. 5 firms answer our crawler with a 403 and we do not work around it, which means we cannot say what those sites publish. 9 more have a roster page we found and no name we could lift from it, which is our crawler falling short rather than their page.
That leaves 42 firms where we found no roster page and no attorney name at all. For a reader that is the same problem in a smaller form: there is no obvious place on the site to find out who would be handling the case.
Attorneys named per firm, across 217 firms
No name to checkAt least one name
No band in that distribution is larger than the empty one. It is not a story about small firms being small: 25 firms here name one or two attorneys each, and that clears the same bar.
Firms naming no attorney we could read, by state
There is no rule against this. The American Bar Association's Model Rule 7.2(d) asks a lawyer advertisement to carry the name and contact information of at least one lawyer or law firm responsible for its content, and a firm name satisfies that. The register, though, indexes people. It has no entry for a trade name, so a firm name is the one piece of information that cannot be looked up.
What a register will answer
The second condition is the state's, and it is the one that stops us more often. Of the 217 firms here, 146 sit in a state that publishes no attorney register we are permitted to query.
That phrasing matters, because it is not the same as the register not existing. Every state here has one and every one is free for a person to search. Florida, Indiana, Maryland, Massachusetts, Oregon and Texas either refuse an automated reader or ask crawlers to stay out, and we honor that, so a profile in those states carries no licensure finding rather than one we did not actually make.
What we could check, across the same 217 firms
Licensure is the check that completed least often, and published discipline is the check that completed most. Discipline was searchable for 118 firms across 6 of the 7 states, because a suspension or a disbarment is ordinarily an order of the state's highest court, and published court decisions are indexed and readable. Whether somebody's registration is current today is held in a register, and most registers are closed to us.
That is backwards from what people expect. The disciplinary history everybody assumes is buried is the more open of the two records, and the routine administrative fact is the harder one to obtain.
Two firms show what each condition is worth. Witherite Law Group publishes 67 attorneys, the largest roster in the directory, and we matched none of them to a registration, because Texas publishes no register we may query. By comparison Lipsitz Green Scime Cambria publishes 49 and 48 of them resolve to a current registration, on the same day, using the same method. The difference between the two is a records policy.
Across the whole directory we tied 581 of the 1,832 published names to a registration. That number is our work rather than anything a firm printed, and it is worth saying plainly: we do not measure whether firms publish bar admission numbers on their bios, so this page makes no claim about that either way.
The rating is not the check
A reader who cannot find a name still has something on the screen, and it is almost always a star rating. It carries no information about any of this.
53 of the 56 firms that name nobody we could read hold a Google rating of 4.5 or better, summed across every listing they operate. Across the directory as a whole, 196 of 217 do. The two groups are indistinguishable on the number a reader is most likely to use.
That is the same lesson the review study reached from the other direction: star ratings across these firms barely differ at all, so almost nothing can be separated by them.
What does separate the two groups is the gates. 126 of the 161 firms with a roster have cleared enough of them to be listed as verified or better. Not one of the 56 without one has. That is not a judgment about the quality of their work, and the site does not present it as one: it is a statement about what can be established from outside.
It is also why an unreadable roster costs a firm nothing in score. Roster verifiability is unscored wherever the state publishes no register, and pending wherever we found no name, which keeps both out of the denominator rather than charging the firm for them. The arithmetic behind that is its own study, and the short version is that a firm never loses points for the reach of our crawl or for its state's records policy.
What to do instead
Ask for the name of the attorney who will handle your case, and ask on the first call. It is a reasonable question, the answer takes a second, and it is the input every other check needs.
Then run the register search yourself. Your state bar publishes one, it is free, and for most people reading this it will answer a question we could not answer from here.
Search the same name against published disciplinary decisions, which is the check that turned out to be more available than the register. State supreme court opinions on attorney discipline are public and indexed.
And treat a missing roster as a question rather than a verdict. Plenty of reasons for one are dull, and a firm that answers the first question above has resolved it in a sentence.
For firms, the fix is a text change. A page with each attorney's name and a link from the main navigation is the difference between a practice anybody can verify in a minute and one nobody can. A firm that thinks we have read its site wrongly can see every sub-factor, the evidence behind it, and the pages we read.
The ranked pages carry all of this on every entry: personal injury firms, and the New York personal injury ranking, where the licensure finding is one a reader can actually see. We took the same approach to what a case results page proves for pillar B.
Attorney names are read from individual bio pages on each firm's own site. Licensure and discipline come from state attorney registers and published court decisions, as each firm's profile records for that firm. Firms marked as samples or not eligible are excluded throughout.