For the Lawyers now has a lawyer directory, and you can claim your free profile at forthelawyers.co/lawyers. Your profile lives at forthelawyers.co/yourusername, it takes about two minutes to set up, and it costs nothing.
If you've ever listed yourself on Avvo, Martindale-Hubbell, FindLaw, or any of the other lawyer directories out there, you know the experience: a cluttered profile page you barely control, competitor ads running alongside your name, and a rating system that nobody fully understands. This is different. Here's how...
Your Profile Has a Clean, Memorable URL
Your listing on most directory sites is buried under a long, forgettable URL full of IDs and query strings. On For the Lawyers, your profile is simply forthelawyers.co/yourname. That's something you can put on a business card, include in an email signature, or share on social media without it looking like a mess.
The URL is yours as long as your profile exists. Nobody else can claim it once you do.
No Competitor Ads on Your Profile
This one is hard to overstate. On Avvo and similar sites, a visitor lands on your profile and immediately sees ads and links for other lawyers, often in the same practice area, often in the same city. You did the work to get that person to your listing, and the platform monetizes that attention by pointing them at your competition.
There are no ads on For the Lawyers profiles. When someone visits your page, they see your information and nothing else.
No Pay-to-Play Rankings
Avvo has a 1-10 rating that it generates algorithmically, and Martindale has its own peer review badges. Both platforms offer paid tiers that increase your visibility in search results on their site. The implicit message is that paying makes you look more credible, and not paying puts you at a disadvantage.
The For the Lawyers directory doesn't rank lawyers. Profiles appear randomly for fairness. There's no algorithm deciding who looks more impressive, and there's nothing to pay to improve your placement.
No Confusing Ratings or Scores
The Avvo score in particular has been criticized so heavily that the New York Attorney General's office investigated it, Avvo paid a $50,000 fine, and was forced to stop calling its ratings "unbiased." A score generated from public data doesn't tell a potential client whether you're actually good at your job, and plenty of excellent attorneys score poorly simply because they haven't claimed their profile.
There are no scores here. Your profile shows what you choose to share: your name, location, bio, contact information, and social links. Clients can make their own judgments.
You Control Your Profile Completely
On most directory sites, your profile exists whether you want it to or not. Someone else created it by scraping public records, and you have to go through a claims process just to edit information about yourself. Even then, you're limited in what you can change, and deleting the profile entirely is often not an option.
On For the Lawyers, you create the profile yourself with your own professional email address. You control every field on it. If you want to delete it, you can do that in seconds with a single confirmation email. The profile exists because you chose to create it, not because a company decided to include you in their database.
It's Completely Free
There's no free tier with a paid upgrade, no premium badge you can purchase, and no credit card required at any step. Claiming a profile is free. Editing it is free. The directory listing is free.
Built for the Audience Already Here
The lawyers finding profiles on For the Lawyers are already reading this blog. They're solo practitioners and small firm attorneys who take their web presence seriously. That's a more relevant audience for most of the lawyers who would claim a profile here than the general public browsing Avvo.
It's a small directory right now, and that's fine. Early profiles get more visibility simply because there's less competition, and the directory will only grow from here.
How to Claim Your Profile
Go to forthelawyers.co/lawyers and click "Claim Your Profile." You'll choose a username, verify with your professional email address (personal email addresses like Gmail are not accepted), and you're done. From there you can fill in as much or as little as you want: your name, location, bio, website, phone, email, and links to your social profiles including LinkedIn, Avvo, and others.
If you have questions or run into any issues, shoot me an email.