Tech Review: Before you put down $300/hour …

What do you call 1,000 lawyers chained together at the bottom of the Chesapeake Bay? A good start.

Want to know what else has a good start? Lawyers.com.

The site, owned by LexisNexis, is packed full of legal information that could be useful and a quick resource for Richmond’s business people.

Virtually any aspect of the law you would want to look up is available to the average Joe.

In addition to the tech review, I type up the business licenses every week, so I was curious about some of the terms associated with a new business meant.

For example, I had always wondered what it meant to be a Limited Liability Company. Low and behold, I found an article, written in everyman English, explaining exactly what it is. You can read it here Lawyers.com is a bit like the WebMD.com of legal matters.

The site is actually very similar to WebMD in its layout and intuitive interface, which is web jargon for “it’s easy to use.” It’s also completely free, which is typically a must for the sorts of sites I review for BizSense. It makes its money by offering premium listings, which are highlighted in blue to let the user know that someone has paid for that listing to be at the top. (I’m skeptical of that sort of business model, buy I digress).

To be sure, there are lots of places where you can find out what an LLC is. But Lawyers.com also has a handy search function for area lawyers. And that’s probably the  most useful part of the site, and it really is a cinch. You can search by name, area of practice (bankruptcy, business law, real estate, etc.) or location. Several of the sites that have offered these search services failed to deliver when it came down to good, local information. TownMe.com was one of those. That site was a good idea but relied on local users to generate content, and there just were not enough Richmonders on the site to make it valuable.

Not the case with Lawyers.com.

All the information seemed to be legit. If you searched by “Practice Area,” then “Bankruptcy,” then narrowed it to Richmond, you will get a fairly comprehensive list of local bankruptcy attorneys. From my experience doing business reporting in the past several months, most of the prominent bankruptcy attorneys in the area were listed high up on the site. Tavenner & Beran, who handled the S&K bankruptcy this summer, were one of those listed.

You can also refine your search results by location, lawyers who offer free initial consultations and even by what law school your lawyer attended. So, if, say, you were a Virginia Tech fan and you didn’t want a lawyer who attended UVA, you could, with one click, remove all UVA grads from the search results.

Nice.

There are other features on the site that are helpful, such as a legal blog. Sure, it isn’t stuffwhitepeoplelike.com, but it’s still decent reading. These are just brief legal advice posts and reactions from lawyers to the latest legal news. One posting, perhaps from an ambulance chaser, is titled “The Ins and Outs of a Dog Bite Injury Claim.”

One not-so-helpful portion of the site is the Legal Forums section. Just like a computer maintenance forum or Yahoo questions forum, users can post their legal concerns on the forum and users can respond. But there is no way to know who is responding to you. You may as well be asking for detailed legal advice from your uncle Buck the dog whisperer.

Here’s one more joke for you: The plumber presented his customer, a lawyer, with a bill charging rates of $500 an hour. The lawyer was outraged, saying “I don’t even make that kind of money — doesn’t that seem a bit steep?” The plumber replied, “That’s what I thought when I was a lawyer.”

David Larter covers technology for BizSense. Please send news tips or your favorite lawyer joke to David@richmondbizsense.com.