There are a lot of lead generation services out there for law firms. The trouble is, there are all kinds of ethical considerations when it comes to paying a non-lawyer for soliciting prospective clients. Up until now, most states have considered it unethical. But recently, legal referral services have gained an unlikely ally – the Federal Trade Commission.

According to the article,

Legal matching services generally charge lawyers to sign up. Consumers seeking legal help with divorces, wills, child custody and trademark issues help describe their needs and locations online. The service sends this to lawyers in the same region and interested attorneys respond – something like a dating service – with their qualifications and rates, allowing clients to shop for the right match.

I’m not sure if this also includes sites that partner with a specific law firm from a region and only send leads to that firm for a fixed price per lead, but it sounds like the services would be similar.

The issue has been debated in ethics committees in a number of states. The state bars of California and New York haven’t said anything – which, given NY’s new advertising laws, you’d think they’d be all over this. Arizona and Washington state bars disapprove while Rhode Island, North Carolina, South Carolina and Utah state bars have approved of the service.

Legal matching service, LegalMatch, recently asked Texas to clarify whether the service violates their ethics code which prohibits state lawyers from paying a non-lawyer to solicit or refer prospective clients. Texas, it seems, is still up in the air on whether this service is ethical or not.

Recently, however, FTC planning and policy chief, Maureen Ohlhausen recently weighed in on the issue. In a letter, she writes

online legal matching services are likely to make it less expensive for consumers to evaluate providers of legal services. The information sent to inquiring clients is likely to allow consumers to compare the price and quality among several competing attorneys more cheaply than other methods of comparison…

The burden should rest on the proponents of a restriction on competition to show that it is necessary to prevent significant consumer harm and that it is narrowly drawn to minimize its anticompetitive impact.

I’m curious what you think. Would you join such a service and bid on work?

Source: The National Law Journal (subscription required)

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One comment

  1. Nathan
    July 11, 2006

    I heard that Arizona has just withdrawn its anti-matching opinion.

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