Clearway LawAbout Us

Clearway Law is a lawyer directory and review platform. It helps people find, compare and contact lawyers, and it gives lawyers a place to present their practice and hear from the people they have acted for. Clearway lists lawyers in Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom and Germany.

Most people with a legal problem never speak to a lawyer. Some cannot find one, some have no way to compare them, and many assume they cannot afford one. Lawyers, for their part, spend heavily to be found. Clearway sits between the two: a public, searchable directory built from the records that legal regulators already publish, with reviews from the people who have hired those lawyers.

Clearway is not a law firm and does not provide legal advice.

Leadership and ownership

Clearway was co-founded by Alistair Vigier, a Canadian Army veteran and entrepreneur, to solve a problem he saw from both sides: the public struggles to find legal counsel, and lawyers struggle to get discovered. Alistair Vigier left Clearway in August 2024. Since then the company has been operated by an independent team. Inquiries about the platform, profiles, reviews or data go to the intake manager at [email protected].

Alistair Vigier now leads Caseway. More about him on Wikipedia. He has no control over the Clearway website.

How lawyer profiles work

Every lawyer profile starts from the public record. Law societies, bars and regulators publish the name, firm, business address, phone number and licence status of every lawyer they regulate, so that the public can find them and check that they are licensed. Clearway builds its directory from those public sources and adds what a person choosing a lawyer needs: practice areas, location, languages and client reviews.

Lawyers can claim their profile at no cost. Once verified, they can correct and update their details, add a photo and biography, choose which contact details are displayed, and respond to reviews. Corrections to factual information (firm, address, phone, licence status) are made whether or not the lawyer claims the profile: email [email protected] with the correct information and a link to the regulator's record.

Clearway does not charge a lawyer to correct, hide or remove anything. Paid features, where offered, are marketing and visibility tools, and they are labelled as paid.

How reviews work

Reviews are written by members of the public about their own dealings with a lawyer, as a client or prospective client. They are the reviewer's account and opinion, and they are published as such. A review may not contain threats, hate, private information about third parties, or allegations of criminal conduct presented as fact. Reviews that are bought, posted in bulk, submitted from the same source under different names, or written by a competitor or an opposing party rather than a client are removed when identified.

Any lawyer can flag a review. A flagged review is checked against these rules, and the reviewer is asked to substantiate their dealings with the lawyer. Reviews that fail the rules or cannot be substantiated are removed. Lawyers can also post a public reply. Because replies are public, regulators have warned lawyers that a reply must not reveal client confidences, so a short, factual reply is the safe course.

Privacy law in Canada

The question Clearway is asked most often is whether it can list a lawyer, and let that lawyer edit the listing, without the lawyer's consent. The answer is yes. The reasons are set out below, with links to the law itself.

A lawyer's professional details are public by design

Every Canadian law society publishes a searchable directory of its members. The Law Society of British Columbia, the Law Society of Ontario and the other provincial and territorial regulators publish each lawyer's name, firm, business address, phone number and current status so that the public can find a lawyer and confirm that the person is licensed. In Quebec, the Barreau's Tableau de l'Ordre is published online under the Professional Code. This is regulatory information about a licensed profession, published for the protection of the public. It is the same information Clearway shows.

Federal privacy law expressly permits using it

The Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA) governs private-sector organisations, including Clearway, and it contains specific exceptions for publicly available information. Sections 7(1)(d), 7(2)(c.1) and 7(3)(h.1) allow an organisation to collect, use and disclose personal information without consent where the information is publicly available and specified by regulation. The Regulations Specifying Publicly Available Information specify, in section 1(b), "personal information including the name, title, address and telephone number of an individual that appears in a professional or business directory, listing or notice, that is available to the public, where the collection, use and disclosure of the personal information relate directly to the purpose for which the information appears in the directory, listing or notice."

A law society directory is a professional directory available to the public. Its purpose is to let the public find and verify lawyers. Clearway uses the information for that purpose and no other.

The Act also signals how it views business contact information. Under section 4.01, a business phone number or email that an organisation uses solely to communicate with someone about their profession sits outside the Act altogether. Clearway does not rely on that exclusion alone, because a directory does more than pass on a phone number; it relies on the publicly available information exception above. The Federal Court of Appeal has explained that this exception is aimed at information that has already been made public: the organisation that first publishes a directory must justify that decision under the Act, and those who later use the published information are the ones the exception is written for (Englander v. TELUS Communications, 2004 FCA 387).

The Privacy Commissioner has already examined this business model

In 2020 the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada investigated RateMDs, a website that lists health practitioners from public registries and publishes anonymous patient ratings, after a practitioner demanded that her profile and ratings be permanently removed (PIPEDA Findings #2020-002). The Commissioner found that the practitioner's business contact information was publicly available within the meaning of the Regulations, that RateMDs did not need her consent to collect and publish it, and that RateMDs did not need to take it down at her request. The ratings were personal information of both the reviewers and the practitioner, but after weighing her interest against the reviewers' right to express themselves and the public's interest in choosing a practitioner, the Commissioner found the consent complaint not well-founded.

The Commissioner did require two things. The site had to be open about how professionals can correct inaccurate, incomplete or out-of-date information, and it had to stop charging practitioners to hide ratings, which the Commissioner treated as a pay-for-takedown practice that no reasonable person would consider appropriate under section 5(3) of the Act. The Commissioner had reached a similar conclusion a year earlier about a directory that charged people to remove their listings (PIPEDA Findings #2019-005), and the Commissioner's guidance on inappropriate data practices names publishing personal information in order to charge for its removal as a practice that is off limits.

Clearway's model is the lawyer equivalent of the model the Commissioner examined, and it is built to meet both conditions: corrections are free and the process is described on this page, and no one is charged to remove or hide anything.

The limits, and how Clearway stays inside them

The exception has limits, and Clearway does not pretend otherwise. In A.T. v. Globe24h.com, 2017 FC 114, the Federal Court ordered a foreign website to remove Canadian court decisions that it had republished and charged people to take down. The exception failed because republishing decisions in order to sell takedowns had nothing to do with the purpose for which the decisions were made public, and the purpose failed the reasonable-person test in section 5(3). The lessons are clear, and Clearway follows them.

• Purpose alignment: Clearway uses regulator data for the same purpose the regulator publishes it, to help the public find and check lawyers.
• No pay-to-remove: removal and correction are never sold.
• Accuracy: PIPEDA's accuracy principle (Schedule 1, clause 4.6) applies to publicly available information as much as to any other, so profiles are refreshed against regulator records and corrected on request.
• Access and correction: clause 4.9 gives every lawyer the right to see what Clearway holds about them and to challenge its accuracy. Claiming a profile is the fastest way to exercise that right.
• Openness: this page, the Terms of Service and the intake manager address exist so that lawyers know how the platform works and who to write to.

The Commissioner's interpretation bulletin on publicly available information makes the same point: the exception removes the consent requirement, and every other obligation in the Act still applies. Clearway's approach is built on that reading.

Provincial law

British Columbia, Alberta and Quebec have their own private-sector privacy statutes; PIPEDA applies in the other provinces, including Ontario. British Columbia's Personal Information Protection Act permits collection, use and disclosure without consent of information that is available to the public from a prescribed source (sections 12(1)(e), 15(1)(e) and 18(1)(e)), and the regulation prescribes a professional or business directory that is available to the public as one of those sources (section 6). Alberta's Personal Information Protection Act has parallel provisions for publicly available information (sections 14(e), 17(e) and 20(j)). Quebec's Act respecting the protection of personal information in the private sector does not apply to information that is public by law (section 1), and the Barreau du Québec's Tableau de l'Ordre is public under the Professional Code.

Reviews and the law of expression

Reviews are treated separately because they are the words of clients rather than regulator data, and Canadian law protects honest opinion about people who offer services to the public. The Supreme Court of Canada set out the modern fair comment defence in WIC Radio v. Simpson, 2008 SCC 40: a comment on a matter of public interest, based on true facts, that an honest person could hold, is protected even when it is harsh. The choice of a lawyer is a matter of public interest to the person making it. The Court has also declined to treat a platform as the publisher of everything it points to (Crookes v. Newton, 2011 SCC 47). Clearway is an intermediary: it hosts reviews, applies published rules, gives every lawyer a right of reply, and removes content that breaks the rules or that a court finds unlawful. A false statement of fact dressed up as a review is not protected opinion, which is why the flagging process exists.

United States

American law is the most protective of directories and reviews of any jurisdiction Clearway operates in.

• Attorney licensing records are public government records. State bars publish licence status, discipline history and business contact details, for example through the State Bar of California's attorney search. California's Consumer Privacy Act excludes from "personal information" any information lawfully made available from government records (Cal. Civ. Code § 1798.140), and the other state privacy laws contain similar exclusions.
• Ratings and profiles built from public records are protected speech. In Browne v. Avvo, Inc., 525 F. Supp. 2d 1249 (W.D. Wash. 2007), a federal court dismissed a lawyer's claim against the Avvo rating site because the ratings were constitutionally protected opinion. In Vrdolyak v. Avvo, Inc., 206 F. Supp. 3d 1384 (N.D. Ill. 2016), the court dismissed a lawyer's right-of-publicity claim over a profile that Avvo had built from bar records without his consent, because the directory itself was protected speech.
• A platform is not the speaker of user reviews. Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act provides that an interactive computer service is not treated as the publisher of information provided by another user. Courts have applied this to review sites and to star ratings computed from user reviews (Kimzey v. Yelp! Inc., 836 F.3d 1263 (9th Cir. 2016)).
• Honest reviews are protected from contractual gag clauses by the Consumer Review Fairness Act of 2016.
• Fake reviews are illegal, and Clearway wants them gone. The Federal Trade Commission's rule on the use of consumer reviews and testimonials, in force since October 2024, prohibits fake or AI-generated reviews, buying positive or negative reviews, and suppressing genuine ones. Clearway's review rules follow it. The FTC's own questions and answers on the rule explain what it requires of a review platform.

United Kingdom

In the UK, the lawful basis for listing a solicitor or barrister without consent is legitimate interests under Article 6(1)(f) of the UK GDPR. The Solicitors Regulation Authority maintains the public register of solicitors, and the Law Society's Find a Solicitor service and the Bar Standards Board's register of barristers are public for the same reason: so that people can find and check a regulated professional. Clearway's interest in helping the public do that, and the public's interest in doing it, are legitimate; the processing is necessary to run a directory at all; and a professional's business details, already published by the regulator, carry a low expectation of privacy. Where personal data is not collected from the individual, Article 14 normally requires individual notice, and Article 14(5)(b) relieves that duty where notice would involve disproportionate effort, which is the case for a directory built from a public register. This page and the privacy policy provide the notice instead.

The UK GDPR gives every listed lawyer rights that Clearway honours: rectification of inaccurate data (Article 16), objection (Article 21) and erasure (Article 17). Objection and erasure are balanced rights. A controller may continue processing where it shows compelling legitimate grounds, and Article 17(3)(a) preserves processing that is necessary for freedom of expression and information. Clearway applies that balance case by case, and corrects errors without argument. The Data (Use and Access) Act 2025 amends the UK GDPR in stages; none of its changes removes the need for a directory to meet the legitimate interests test, and Clearway continues to apply it.

Reviews are covered by section 5 of the Defamation Act 2013, which gives a website operator a defence for user content it did not post, provided it follows the notice-and-response process in the Defamation (Operators of Websites) Regulations 2013. Clearway operates that process. The Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024 banned fake reviews from April 2025, and the Competition and Markets Authority's guidance on fake reviews requires review platforms to take reasonable and proportionate steps to prevent and remove them, which is what Clearway's review rules do.

Germany

Germany has the most developed case law on rating portals anywhere, and it supports listing professionals without their consent, on conditions.

The Bundesrechtsanwaltskammer maintains the official nationwide register of lawyers, the Bundesweites Amtliches Anwaltsverzeichnis, under § 31 of the Bundesrechtsanwaltsordnung, which publishes each lawyer's name, chambers address, contact details, professional titles and admission details. Under the GDPR, Clearway processes that data on the basis of legitimate interests (Article 6(1)(f)), and lawyers have the right to object (Article 21) and the right to rectification (Article 16).

The Federal Court of Justice (Bundesgerichtshof) has held repeatedly that professionals must tolerate being listed and rated on a portal. In the spickmich.de decision of 23 June 2009 (VI ZR 196/08) it allowed a teacher-rating portal. In the first jameda decision of 23 September 2014 (VI ZR 358/13) it held that a doctor has no claim to have his profile deleted from a rating portal, because the public's interest in information about professionals outweighs the doctor's interest in controlling his data. The conditions were set in the second jameda decision of 20 February 2018 (VI ZR 30/17) and confirmed on 12 October 2021 (VI ZR 488/19 and VI ZR 489/19): a portal keeps the right to list non-consenting professionals only while it remains a neutral information intermediary. It loses that right if it covertly uses the profiles of non-paying professionals as advertising space for paying ones. Openly disclosed advantages for paying customers are permitted. The court has also defined the operator's duty to investigate when a professional disputes a review (decision of 1 March 2016, VI ZR 34/15), and it has allowed a portal to decide which reviews count toward an overall rating as long as the basis is clear to users (Yelp, 14 January 2020, VI ZR 495/18). At the appellate level, the Oberlandesgericht Stuttgart ordered the deletion of a one-star review of a lawyer that had been posted by the opposing party rather than a client (31 August 2022, 4 U 17/22), because a review that falsely implies a client relationship is unlawful.

Clearway applies these rules in Germany and everywhere else. It stays neutral, it labels paid features, it never uses one lawyer's profile to advertise another, it investigates disputed reviews, and it removes reviews that do not come from a genuine client or prospective client.

Common concerns

"I am a lawyer and I want my profile removed"

Clearway does not remove accurate profiles of licensed lawyers on request, for the reasons above: the information is public regulatory information, the law in each of Clearway's markets permits a directory to publish it, and the Privacy Commissioner of Canada, the US federal courts and the German Federal Court of Justice have each declined to order a directory or rating site to delete a professional's profile on demand. What Clearway will do, at no cost: correct any error, update your details, let you choose which contact details are displayed, publish your reply to any review, and remove reviews that break the rules. Where a lawyer is no longer licensed or has left practice, Clearway updates the profile to say so and will remove it on request. Clearway also removes or edits a profile where publication creates a documented safety risk. Write to [email protected].

"A review about me is negative, or I think it is fake"

Negative reviews are part of a review platform. A lawyer with a public practice cannot expect only praise, and the law in every country Clearway operates in protects honest opinion about professional services. Fake reviews are a different matter and Clearway wants them off the platform: reviews that do not come from a genuine client or prospective client, that are bought, that are posted in bulk, or that come from a competitor or an opposing party are removed when identified. Flag the review from your claimed profile, or email the intake manager with the reason. Clearway asks the reviewer to substantiate their dealings with you and removes reviews that cannot be substantiated. You can also post a public reply. Keep it short and factual, and do not disclose client confidences.

"My profile is out of date"

Profiles start from regulator records and are refreshed against them, but firms change, people move, and records lag. The fix takes minutes: claim your profile and edit it, or email the correction to the intake manager with a link to your law society record. Accuracy is a legal obligation for Clearway under the privacy statutes described above, and corrections are free.

"The public is contacting me through Clearway and I did not ask for it"

That is what a public directory is for. Law societies publish lawyers' business contact details so that the public can reach them, and Clearway shows the same details for the same purpose. If you would rather not receive inquiries through Clearway, claim your profile and choose which contact details are displayed. Clearway's own emails to lawyers comply with Canada's Anti-Spam Legislation: consent is implied where a professional has conspicuously published a business email address and the message relates to their role (section 10(9)(b)), every message identifies the sender, and every message carries an unsubscribe that is honoured within ten business days.

"My licence status is wrong"

Licence status comes from the regulator's record at the time the profile was built or last refreshed, and it can lag a suspension, a retirement or a return to practice. The regulator's directory is the authority, and every Clearway profile links to it so that anyone can check the current status before hiring. If a status is wrong, email the intake manager with the regulator link and it will be corrected. Where a lawyer is no longer licensed, the profile says so.

"The website has problems"

Parts of the site have had technical problems, including pages that load slowly or fail to load and functions that do not work as intended. The team is working through the backlog and expects the fixes to be complete around November 2026. If you hit a problem, email the intake manager with the page address and a description of what happened. That is the fastest way to get it into the queue.

Contact

All inquiries about profiles, reviews, corrections, data or the website: [email protected].

Clearway is not a law firm and does not provide legal advice.