Avvo, Lexblog, Martindale-Hubbell, blogs, blogs, blogs.  Information is good.  More information is better.  It can’t possibly be bad to provide the consumer with all the information available out there, accessible at the touch of a button.  Millions and millions of bits and bytes.  The more the merrier.

Sorry, but there comes a point of diminishing returns.  No information precludes consumers of legal services from making intelligent choices.  But too much may be more damaging, and there is clearly too much.  I get emails daily from some new lawyer searching service, offering me the great opportunity to join them (and put their link on my blawg to improve the height of my profile).  How many are there now?  There are the big ones, like Avvo, M-H and the cheating-heart Findlaw, but there are an ever-increasing number of small ones as well. 

What’s gotten me all worked up?  There’s a guy who is sitting in jail, remanded (meaning no bail for you non-lawyer types), even as I write.  He came from out of town, and wasn’t quite equipped to be busted.  He didn’t know who to turn to, and was constrained to leave it to baby mama to do the trick.

Baby mama came equipped with a computer, and did the best she could to find a lawyer for her man.  And she did.  In spades.  Armed with a list, she methodically called lawyer upon lawyer.  She discussed the case, though she had negligible information and conveyed the wrong impression about what the man was facing.  After she would call names on the list, she would go back to lawyers she had already called to discuss questions and issues that were raised during subsequent calls.  It became a vicious circle.

Baby mama’s primary concern, as is almost always the case at this stage of the proceedings, is whether the lawyer could guarantee that he could get her man out.  Some, naturally, were happy to offer that guarantee.  Others told her there was no such guarantee.  Few had a clue why the man was being held, since baby mama didn’t understand the situation well enough to explain it accurately.  None made baby mama feel sufficiently comfortable to take the dive, because there was always another name on the list to contact and she couldn’t commit until she knew for sure.

Typically, baby mama didn’t realize that this process couldn’t happen in real time over a holiday weekend, when lawyers sometimes take their tie off.  This delayed the methodical process.  And then there was the issue of actually retaining a lawyer, which hadn’t occurred to baby mama until she realized that all of the lawyers she was calling would eventually expect to be paid a sum of money for their work.  This hit her like a ton of bricks, because she didn’t have any money, but had to go to her man’s family for some green.

More than a week passed between baby mama’s first telephone call and the man’s appearance in court.  When the moment came to make the bail application, not a single lawyer who spoke with baby mama was in the courtroom.  Her head was spinning.  She tried so very hard.  She wanted to do the right thing for her man.  But she was paralyzed by the wealth of information available to her.  And her man was remanded.

Now baby mama wants to know which lawyer on the list can guarantee that they can undo the damage.

Update:  And like clockwork, along comes today’s newest and grooviest lawyer sucker scam called “Meet the Elite.”  Catchy, no?  Hyped as “

One of NY’s Fastest Growing Legal Networking Sites

Are lawyers really this desperate and pathetic?