Legal Marketing & PR

Free Lawyer Directory from Justia & Cornell Legal Information Institute

By Timothy Stanley

Hi Friends,

Justia and the Legal Information Institute at Cornell Law School have been building a lawyer directory the last few months to help individuals, families and businesses find lawyers and legal service organizations. (See the Justia Lawyer Directory and the LII Lawyer Directory).

We are happy to announce that this project will be moving out of pre-beta and into beta. Also see the LII Blog announcement: LII launches free lawyer directory service.

Any lawyer licensed to practice in the United States may have a free full profile. Just claim or add your profile and update. It is really easy.

The Lawyer Directory can help lawyers reach new clients. The Lawyer Directory connects consumers and businesses facing legal issues with attorneys and legal services organizations. The directory organizes lawyers throughout the United States by practice area and location. To find a lawyer, a prospective client can browse the directory by practice area or location, or search by keyword and location.

Full lawyer profiles in the directory are free. Lawyers can claim their profiles and enhance them with professional biographical data including practice areas, education, job history, jurisdictions of practice, as well as photos, videos, and links and/or feeds from legal & social networks (JDSupra, Avvo, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and SSRN), and their law firm’s web site and blog.

Provide & Promote Free Information and be Rewarded with Higher Rankings in the Lawyer Directory

Lawyers who support the publishing of free legal information online, either through their own direct efforts (such as by blogging) or by helping organizations like the Legal Information Institute, will be listed higher in the rankings.

Currently, the lawyer directory awards a “Blawg” badge to lawyers who have had their blog editorially included in Justia’s BlawgSearch.com directory. Submit your Blawg to BlawgSearch.com for editorial consideration – it is free :). We also award a “Legal Birds” badge to lawyers who use Twitter. More participation options will be coming soon. With the badges also come higher lawyer directory rankings – so collect them all.

Support the Legal Information Institute.
Lawyers can also earn a LII badge by supporting the Legal Information Institute at Cornell Law School. There are three levels of support: Bronze ($250/yr), Silver ($500/yr) and Gold ($1,000/yr). The support goes to Cornell, and they will use it to hire up programming and editorial talent to put up more free information. What could be better! All of the Justia in-house lawyers have Gold LII badges :). And we are now in the process of encouraging our clients to get badges too.

Blogging, tweeting, or financially supporting LII will lead to higher rankings on listing pages but are not required to be included in the directory with a full profile. They only impact the rank order on the listings pages. So get in the directory no matter what, and then start planning how you can help the online community put up more good free legal research information to make the world a better place and get some marketing credit for yourself.

We are developing more features… but more on those later :)

Peace,

Tim & Ken

:: Revolution Blues, On the Beach by Neil Young

Full post as published by Justia Legal SEO Blog on January 21, 2009 (boomark / email).