This strikes me as potentially very important: An Unlikely Source Stirs Debate Over Avvo Legal Services, by @bobambrogi: bit.ly/2sFHW2A
The Illinois Attorney Registration and Disciplinary Commission, which oversees IL attorney discipline, published a 124-page report that makes two significant observations.
The first is that it describes Avvo's "marketing fee" as a "referral fee," but says the Rules of Professional Conduct should be amended to allow such fees. Both of these observations seem to me entirely correct.
The second is that it recommends the regulation of lawyer-client matching services, to ensure they don't interfere with lawyers' professional obligations or judgment.
Now, the only argument I've ever heard against "fee-sharing with non-lawyers" was that lawyers' delicate professional sensibilities would be corrupted thereby, even though I've been cited no examples of such occurrences.
So I'm perfectly fine with regulating these services -- *if* such regulation is proportional to the risk, which means it should be light. And the best way to ensure that lightness is by keeping this regulatory role far away from state bars.
The important thing here is that someone in the regulatory space has openly identified the risk behind non-lawyer fee-splitting and challenged lawyers to ether regulate the risk or stop using it as a shield. No idea if anyone will run with it, but it's there to be run with.
@threadreaderapp unroll please
