On the first day of Legal Ethics last semester, my professor asked us, "If a friend came to you asking for help finding a lawyer, what would you tell them?" It was a good question, largely because I've already faced it, and my answer was typically, "I don't really know," followed by some of the standards, such as Martindale-Hubbell, the local bar association, yellow pages, etc. In other words, I wasn't much help, and it was unclear that those resources were going to be much help, either.

With that (and visions of advertising revenue) in mind, a hotly discussed site called Avvo has recently sprung up. They've harvested data from numerous public sources to provide a directory and public rating system for lawyers. They're correlating data on disciplinary actions, as well. Lawyers, often technophobes and protective of what content is out there about them, have been... displeased. Not surprisingly, there's already been a lawsuit filed.

How does this become an issue of online (digital) identity? Much of the dismay centers around the process required to claim your own profile, specifically, that it requires handing Avvo a credit card. Of course, we know that credit cards are horrible identifiers. Courts have routinely rejected the concept (see, for instance, Reno v. ACLU, Ashcroft v. ACLU, and the excellent findings of fact in ACLU v. Gonzalez, 478 F.Supp.2d 775.) And so, what do we do?

This is an excellent example of where a verified identity scheme, whether OpenID, InfoCard, or some other sufficiently robust scheme could be used. Under current OpenID specs, it might not be possible to actually assert sufficient information to properly verify you are an attorney on the Avvo site. However, combined with a service such as Jyte, maybe it would. That's really where something like InfoCard (or other, verified, federated identity capable of asserting attributed in a reasonable, user-centric way) could come into play, allowing a person to select a verified InfoCard that properly asserted the person as the lawyer presented on the Avvo site.

In the meantime, Avvo is yet another site collecting a set of its own user credentials, credit card information, and attempting steps at connecting real-world people with cyberspace fictions.