A company called Clearway Law, led by Alistair Vigier, has gone live with the first lawyer community in Canada. While other websites like Lawyer Ratingz and Canada Law List have existed for many years, others offered little interaction between the public and lawyers.
*December 2024 update: Alistair Vigier is no longer with Clearway.
The Lawyer Ratingz website seems mainly used by clients and competitors to leave negative reviews for lawyers. This has left many Canadian lawyers nervous and sometimes angry about new online communities using lawyers’ pictures and information. At the same time, many law firms and marketing agencies often seek new free or low-cost options to expand their law practice.
Google Ads and Facebook Ads can be very expensive. And only a few law firms can afford billboards and radio advertising, which can cost $10,000+ per month.
We interviewed Alistair Vigier, the CEO of Clearway Law, to learn more about his lawyer profile project/company. We also asked him some tough questions about law firms’ everyday concerns. If you have other questions you want Alistair Vigier to answer, you can leave them below in the comments section, and we can try to set up a part two interview.
How did you decide to index every lawyer in Canada and put them online?
Alistair Vigier: I worked for a law firm for five years and noticed a serious disconnect between potential clients and lawyers. The lawyers at the law firm always wanted new clients because they needed to fill their “sales pipeline.” At the end of a three-week trial, they would need new legal work, but they didn’t have time to speak to clients until the end.
So, every time potential clients call the law firm, want to book a consultation, and wait three weeks for an appointment. By that time, other law firms who had paralegals or “customer support” staff do the consultations would get the client. It was frustrating.
Many lawyers were so afraid of the Law Society that they were unwilling to try anything new. But for the open-minded law firms, they got most of the clients (and still never got in trouble.)
So, at the end of the lawyer’s three-week trial, the lawyer would have no billable work for weeks. The potential clients weren’t happy, and the lawyers weren’t happy. There was no way for the public to know which lawyers they should contact for consultations. Lawyers were getting by financially.
I wanted to find a way for the public to search lawyers and law firms by practice area, city, rating (1-5 stars), and price range (pro bono, legal aid, average, high quality/price.) The goal of Clearway Law isn’t to replace lawyers (unlike some AI companies) but to increase the number of people hiring and paying lawyers.
In some courts, only 30% of people are represented by a lawyer. I wanted to change that. Lawyers make more money; clients get proper legal advice. Instead of the current lose-lose situation Canada is currently in, it would change to a win-win.
But why did you need to add a profile for every lawyer in Canada to achieve your goals?
Why did you do so without consent or asking lawyers to sign up?
Alistair Vigier: The goal was to allow the public to leave a review for every lawyer in Canada. It doesn’t matter if the lawyer is in Toronto doing family law or in Victoria, BC, doing real estate law. The goal is to have ratings for at least 80% of lawyers in Canada and for all consumer-facing lawyers to have ratings.
Likely, lawyers who work as in-house counsel or the government won’t have any ratings. We check every rating to make sure it appears to be legitimate. We take down reviews if we find out they are not legit.
However, all lawyers must be on the website so the public can see their information. Which law school they attended, their office address (not home address), practice area, the name of their workplace, their online rating, their picture, and more.
There was no way to wait for 130,000 lawyers to sign up on Clearway Law independently. It never would have happened.
We saw some lawyers complaining online about being unable to change their profile picture on Clearway Law. Why won’t you change the images?
We went live with our first version of Clearway Law around August 2022, which wasn’t perfect. We were trying to improve our web indexing algorithm and code, and to be honest, it wasn’t great. The goal was to see if the public cared about the lawyer profiles. We could raise money from investors once we had over 100,000 monthly views.
Our algorithm didn’t do well with Indian names. When the code tried to find the lawyer’s picture online, it confused men and women for Indian names. So, it posted a picture of a man for an Indian woman’s profile… We got a lot of lawyers in Surrey, BC, and Brampton, Ontario, who were upset.
Some of the lawyers left one-star reviews on Google Maps and wrote nasty things on social media (most of which were utterly false, or at least very dramatic.) I was even called a Chinese spy, a fake veteran, a fraudster, and a molester for not taking down lawyer profiles upon request.
Learn more about the law in Canada:
Since we didn’t have the back-end system yet for the lawyers to claim their profiles (we do now), I had to manually respond to each lawyer who wanted to change their profile address or pictures. Hundreds of lawyers would email me daily. I did the best I could to update the photos.
I edited any lawyer who sent me their correct photo. Some threatened me, and I blocked them. I will not correspond with anyone who engages in harassment. I changed the profiles manually for hundreds of lawyers in 2021.
Did you look into the Canadian laws about any of this?
Yes, we got legal advice from Canada’s top privacy law firm. Indexing is allowed in Canada; many companies you know and love do it. Google Search and Yelp, for example.
The only thing we are not allowed to do is “pay for takedown” of a negative review. A company called Rate MDs got in trouble for doing that. We didn’t want to do that anyway, as we believe it isn’t very ethical.
Was Clearway a law firm before?
Yes, in 2018, Clearway Law was a law firm in Ontario that did family law. At one point, we had eight part-time contractor lawyers, all called in Ontario. Most of the lawyers who worked for us worked remotely (we didn’t have an office space.)
The idea was to have Clearway Law staff do the consultations (and not offer legal advice) and then send a general retainer to the client. If the client is interested in retaining, the lawyer will do a paid “legal advice” consultation and, hopefully, get the retainer agreement signed and collect the money in their trust account.
We stopped the law firm in 2020 and moved towards being a legal directory. Investors had little to no interest in investing in a law firm because non-lawyers could not own shares in a law firm in Canada. We needed to be able to raise millions of dollars to achieve our goals of improving access to justice and lawyer accountability in Canada.
Lawyers also kept submitting Law Society complaints (all shut and closed without citations) for various reasons. They complained about our large-scale marketing and legal structure and suggested we were not a law firm because I ran it. I went to law school but didn’t get called as a lawyer.
