How to Find an Attorney

Copyright 1998-2004 by Ronald B. Standler

Directories of Attorneys U.S. Patent Office Family Law My Comments on Advertising by Attorneys Resources to Avoid

Attorneys in the USA are licensed to practice law only in specific states. Most attorneys are licensed to practice law in only one state, although a few are licensed in two states.

It is a violation of both law and professional ethics to give legal advice to someone who resides in a state where the attorney is not licensed to practice. Furthermore, giving legal advice (even gratuitously) can expose an attorney to charges of malpractice. For these reasons, most attorneys discourage questions from residents of other states, unless the out-of-state resident is seeking legal representation in the attorney's state.

Directories of Attorneys

West, the largest publisher of court opinions and legal treatises in the USA, maintains the West Legal Directory. There are two ways to search this directory:
1. "search by location", This is the normal way to search when you seek an attorney to solve a problem.
2. "search by name", the way to find credentials of an attorney whose name you found in another source (e.g., telephone book Yellow Pages, recommendation from a friend).
One can also search the Internet for web sites for law firms or attorneys by using a search engine, such as Google.

The search should include some words that indicate a specific area of law, for example:
- administrative law (i.e., government regulatory agencies)
- admiralty or maritime law
- banking law
- bankruptcy law
- business law or commercial law (i.e., contracts, sales, leases, franchises, securities)
- civil rights law
- collections or debtor or creditor
- computer law
- construction law
- consumer law
- "copyright law" or copyrights (Searches for the singular noun, "copyright", will return copyright notices.)
- corporate law or partnership law (i.e., creation and management of business entities)
- criminal law
- education law
- environmental law
- employment law or employer-employee law or labor law
- family law or "domestic relations law" or "matrimonial law" or "divorce law"
- health law
- immigration law or naturalization or visas
- intellectual property (i.e., patents, trademarks, copyrights, trade secrets)
- international law
- landlord and tenant law
- medical malpractice (a subspecies of tort law)
- patent law or "patent attorney"
- products liability (a subspecies of tort law)
- real estate law
- securities law
- tax law or taxation
- torts or negligence or "personal injury"
- trademark law or trademarks
- wills or probate or estate or trust see also: tax
- workers' compensation
- zoning law
Example: To find attorneys who practice education law in Massachusetts, one might use the Google search engine, with the query:
attorney Massachusetts "education law"
Note the quotation marks around "education law" so this term is searched as a phrase.

In search engines that accept a Boolean query, I suggest:
(attorney or lawyer) and Massachusetts and "education law"
If the search engine has a sort by field, use the name of the state (e.g., Massachusetts).
The Yellow Pages of the telephone book contains advertisements for some lawyers, but many prestigious attorneys choose not to advertise there. These advertisements are expensive: a 3.8 × 2.3 inch display advertisement in the Boston Yellow Pages for the year 2000 costs about $ 7440.

If you are interested in either personal injury law, criminal defense, bankruptcy, or divorce law, there are many advertisements under Lawyers or Attorneys. But if you are interested in a less common specialty (e.g., computer law, education law, copyright law), then you will probably do better to look in the Guide, Arranged by Practice that immediately follows the main listing of Lawyers or Attorneys.
Bar associations in some states and large cities have a list of local attorneys. The American Bar Association has a web page with links to lawyer referral programs of these state and local bar associations.
The best-known directory of attorneys in the USA is published by Martindale-Hubbell. If you have access to LEXIS/NEXIS on-line databases, you can search the Martindale-Hubbell directory there. A cruder search engine is provided at the Martindale-Hubbell Internet site, which provides several ways to search:
1. search by "location/area of practice", the normal way to search when you seek an attorney to solve a problem.
2. search by "lawyer", the way to find credentials of an attorney whose name you found in another source (e.g., telephone book Yellow Pages, recommendation from a friend).
Martindale-Hubbell is expensive: in the year 2003, a listing there plus a link to my website cost $ 1855, but referred only 23 hits to my website, none of whom became paying clients. I had a listing in Martindale-Hubbell during 1999-2003, but I have discontinued my advertising there.

U.S. Patent Office

The U.S. Patent Office maintains its own qualifications and examinations for people who are authorized to prosecute patent applications for clients. (To take the Patent Office examination, a candidate must have at least a bachelor's degree with a major in physics, chemistry, biology, or some area of engineering — a requirement that excludes most attorneys.)

A "patent agent" is a non-attorney, who prepares patent applications for clients. A "patent attorney" is licensed to practice law in at least one state and is also a patent agent. Patent attorneys often do licensing, technology transfer, patent infringement litigation, as well as practice in areas of copyright, trademark, and trade secret law.

The U.S. Patent Office has posted on the Internet a list of names, addresses, and telephone numbers of Patent Attorneys and Agents Registered to Practice before the PTO. The U.S. Patent & Trademark Office can not assist people in the selection of an attorney. 37 CFR 1.31.

Family Law

After I posted some essays at my website about pre- and post-nuptial agreements, reimbursement of a spouse's educational expense at divorce, and the legal duty of divorced parents to pay for their child's college education, I received some inquiries asking for a referral to an attorney who specializes in such matters.

The most prestigious organization of attorneys who specialize in family law is the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers, which has a directory of its members in each state. Of course, there are many competent and experienced divorce attorneys who are not members of the AAML.

One can use the hints above to find attorneys via West Legal Directory, the Internet, telephone Yellow Pages, or bar associations. My impression is that most attorneys who specialize in family law do not have a website. On the other hand, clients might want to choose an attorney who has an informative website, to reward that attorney for sharing information on the Internet.

If both parties in a divorce are committed to reaching a settlement — instead of slow, expensive, adversarial litigation — then you might want to search for "collaborative divorce" attorneys in your state.

If you want an unconventional prenuptial agreement, but local specialists in family law tell you "You can't do that," then you have a dilemma:

You can have a specialist in family law write a prenuptial agreement that is probably enforceable at divorce, but does not include all of your wishes and desires.
You could find a local attorney who:
- has some knowledge about divorce law, but is not a specialist in family law,
- has experience in drafting contracts in other areas, and
- is creative at solving problems, instead of saying "You can't do that."
and have him/her draft the prenuptial agreement that you really want. However, such a prenuptial agreement may not be enforceable at divorce. And using a nonspecialist in family law to draft a contract may make it more likely that there will be omissions of contingencies that a specialist, because of his/her experience and knowledge, could anticipate. And, be aware that, as you get a more unconventional prenuptial agreement, it may also be easier to attack the validity of that agreement at divorce, which reduces the value and utility of the prenuptial agreement.

The problem is not that specialists in family law tend to be rigidly conventional, but that judges in divorce courts (who you ask to enforce the contract) are rigidly conventional.

My Comments on Advertising by Attorneys

Many advertisements by attorneys, particular the advertisements on television or display advertisements in the telephone Yellow Pages, are superficial and give little information about the attorney's credentials.

In my opinion, pictures of scales of justice are a cliché. In my opinion, slogans (e.g., "Let us fight for you!") are empty promises, besides — do you really want a jousting match, or do you want a solution to your problem? Moreover, every attorney owes a duty of loyalty to his/her client, so additional promises are superfluous.

Resources to Avoid

The resources listed above are all that I can recommend. However, there is a rapid proliferation of commercial web sites that list names and addresses of attorneys in the USA. I see a number of problems with these new commercial sites:

These new sites typically charge an attorney between $ 100 and $ 600/year for one link to an attorney's web site. For an extra fee, many commercial web sites will put an attorney's name and link at the top of the list or in one of the top five positions. I find this practice distasteful: the tradition on the Internet is that hypertext links are free. My impression is that these new commercial sites are primarily a way for the site operator to make money. These new sites have less information about attorneys than the two older directories, Martindale-Hubbell and West Legal Directory.
Most of these new commercial sites are not well known to attorneys: if you look at any one referral site, you will find only a few of the attorneys who practice in a particular specialty in your location. In contrast, most practicing attorneys are listed in at least one of the following: Martindale-Hubbell, West Legal Directory, and their local Yellow Pages.
Many of these new commercial services have overlapping categories for areas of practice (e.g., both intellectual property and patent, trademark & copyright), which means that (1) you may need to search in more than one category and (2) the attorney who doesn't want to be overlooked must pay extra for listings in multiple categories.
These new commercial services list only the name, address, telephone number, and URL of an attorney, but no credentials. Therefore, — unlike the situation at Martindale-Hubbell and West Legal Directory — it is not easy for you to determine which attorney is best qualified to understand your problem from looking at the advertisements in these new commercial services.

There has also been a proliferation of websites in which a person types a few sentences about their problem in an online bulletin board and an attorney then gives advice to that person. I am dismayed by such "services," for the following reasons:

The person asking for advice chooses which facts to reveal online. That person may be unaware that there are other facts that are also legally significant. Without considering all legally significant facts, the attorney's opinion is worthless.

In a traditional attorney-client relationship, an attorney often interviews a client for several hours, then the attorney carefully reads relevant documents supplied by the client (e.g., contracts, advertisements, policy manuals, ....) before the attorney gives even a preliminary opinion. Because this careful investigation by the attorney is missing from the online bulletin boards, the attorney's opinion can only be superficial.
An online bulletin board is public, so there is no confidentiality and no attorney-client privilege for information exchanged in an online forum. I am uncomfortable with any forum in which people disclose private information to a professional without confidentiality.
In some of the online bulletin boards I have seen, a person in state X posts a question and an attorney in state Y posts an answer. This may be an illegal practice of law by the attorney, unless the attorney is also licensed to practice in state X. Even if the giving of advice is legal, there is still doubt whether an attorney in state Y would know the law in state X. Both statutory and case law are different in each state.
Many interesting legal questions involve novel, controversial, or unsettled law. The decision of a court is not predictable in these cases.

In other situations, a party may have a clear legal right or entitlement, but the party will be unable to obtain that right or entitlement without an expensive fight in court.

Still other situations involve obscure or developing areas of law, in which an attorney may need to spend at least tens of hours reading cases and statutes, before giving legal advice.

In each of these special situations, the question posed by a person is not appropriate for a quick answer on an online bulletin board.

The operators of these online bulletin boards sanctimoniously speak of their "public service" in making legal advice available at no cost to the users. Is it really a desirable service to have superficial or inaccurate answers to legal questions? I believe these online bulletin boards are nothing more than a way for the website operators to make money from selling banner advertisements. The free legal advice is just a ploy to attract many visitors to the website, thus increasing the number of clicks on the banner advertisements.

This page is at http://www.rbs2.com/findatty.htm
created 3 July 1998, modified 15 Dec 2004, minor revision 3 Jan 2012

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