You’ve probably already heard of Justia.com.

The site has built a reputation as one of the largest online repositories of legal information as well as being a big-time proponent of providing the public with free legal information. 

Continuing with our ongoing series, Clearway Investigates, we’ll be diving into the services and information provided by Justia.com, so you can decide whether it’s worth your time (or more importantly, your money).

We’ve done a lot of the legwork here for you. We’ve scoured the deepest, darkest depth of the legal subreddits and law-related Facebook groups. Our team has poured over complaints from the Better Business Bureau and reports that have surfaced in the news. We’ve even reviewed their Q&A and read through their terms of service (who does that?).

If you’re a current user of Justia.com or planning on subscribing to any of their paid services, we urge you to read through our review first.

What is Justia.com?

Let’s start off by saying that Justia.com is huge. 

Its biggest claim to fame is its robust and detailed database of US federal and state laws, statutes, and regulations. It also features information on a handful of South American countries as well. The site dutifully transcribes court dockets to serve as a one-stop resource for lawyers researching case law, law students studying for the bar as well as the public at large.

In addition to the information on the law itself, Justia.com also serves as a directory for lawyer services. The directory is organized by city, state, and legal specialization so visitors can zero in on the precise specialization they need in their local area.

The site has more recently started to roll out a ranking system that provides a score based on a list of criteria. The unique aspect is that the reviews are not provided by the public or clients, but rather by other lawyers. Only registered members of the site can leave reviews that are used in this ranking algorithm.

Comparing lawyers

There’s even a feature that allows you to select up to three lawyer profiles at a time to bring up a side-by-side comparison.

Registering for a lawyer profile on Justia.com is free, although there is the option to pay for a better placement through a gold or platinum placement package. Each lawyer profile contains complete information on that lawyer’s experience, specializations, and more. There’s an opportunity to earn different badges to help make your profile stand out even more, although it’s not entirely clear what these icons represent all the time.

Justia also offers a Q&A feature that is becoming more and more common on legal sites across the web. Registered lawyers can answer these questions to earn badges for their own profiles and points. These points are featured on a leaderboard that is visible in different places across the website. Answers left by attorneys are accompanied by contact information from their profiles. Furthermore, aggregated questions answered by each attorney will appear in a special section on their own profile pages.

Legal News Verdict Justia

The amount of public service found on the site is pretty incredible!

Verdict.Justia.com is the news magazine arm of the organization. This section offers news, legal analysis, and commentary on timely topics related to the law.

Lastly, there’s an incredibly comprehensive newsletter system. Set up as either daily or weekly digests, the newsletter can provide summaries of decisions across the many courts across the states. There is also a newsletter connected to Verdict, the site’s online magazine. Best of all, it’s entirely free!

Furthermore, the website itself claims to be the most frequently visited US legal website with over 12 million visitors per month. This is a credible claim as SEMrush reports a reputation score of 80 and monthly organic visitors of between 4 and 5 million. And that’s just unpaid search traffic, not to mention visitors from paid ads, social media, referrals, and other sources.

What’s the Justia.com story?

Justia.com was founded in 2003 and is based out of Mountain View, California. They have several offices throughout the state of California and one office in Mexico. More recently, Justia.com has begun to offer full web marketing services including site hosting and a full suite of digital marketing services.

The site is generally well regarded and has a significant claim to being a top legal resource in the US. The company’s mission statement is all about providing free legal resources to all! 

A unique aspect of Justia.com is its peer rating and review system. Unlike most sites that base their profile rankings on client feedback, Justia’s ranking system is solely based on peer and colleague feedback. This is meant to be a less biased option, but I’m not so sure. For a member of the public looking for a lawyer, the experience of others in a similar position would be more useful in my opinion.

Information on court decisions

The primary complaints I’ve been able to uncover are related to making personal information public. Justia.com regularly publishes materials from court dockets across the United States that include information on court decisions, making it easily accessible via Google search. 

This information is publicly available, but Justia.com has received numerous complaints on the Better Business Bureau website. As they are only reproducing publicly available information, Justia is within its rights to publish this information, although they are willing to submit de-indexing requests to have those results removed from Google, making them less accessible to the public.

Does Justia.com offer any paid services?

They have to pay for all the free stuff somehow.

To support its more altruistic goals, the company does offer a whole suite of products and services to its registered members. In addition to paid placements for its own lawyer profile pictures, the company also offers a whole suite of marketing services specially designed for legal professionals.

Justia Connect is the basic profile you can set up on the site, which you can upgrade to pro. A pro account gives you more options to customize your profile to make it stand out, as well as remove competitor ads from appearing alongside your profile page. As we mentioned above, you can also pay for better directory placement through either gold or platinum placement.

Custom content management system

Justia Elevate is a website service and custom content management system. The websites are powered by WordPress but custom to Justia. These websites are all hosted by Justia and are customizable and feature a blog. The company also provides optional content writing and SEO services.

Justia Amplify is to off-site marketing what Elevate is to on-site. The service provides pay-per-click advertising services, Google MyBusiness setup, and even social media options.

Justia.com has made a big push toward being a lawyer’s one-stop solution to all things online marketing.

Is a paid Justia.com profile worth it?

When it comes down to the free services provided by Justia.com, the answer is what have you got to lose? It’s relatively quick and easy to set up a lawyer profile and as we’ve stated above, Justia.com receives a huge amount of monthly traffic.

But, the popularity of the website brought by this huge amount of traffic is also its downfall. Justia.com is a popular service that is almost a must-have for any lawyer looking to establish an online presence. As a result, even with one of the promoted positions in the directory, you’re still going to be only one profile among many. 

The premium position will afford you better visibility, but the difference isn’t staggering. A better strategy may be to stick with the free profile, fully fill it out and become active on the Q & A section of the site. The Q & A section is a great way to demonstrate your expertise with the law while also promoting your profile. Each answer in the Q&A features your full contact information and a link to your profile.

Are Justia.com’s marketing solutions worth the money?

No doubt about it, Justia.com provides an invaluable service to the public, both by making bountiful legal information easily available and by providing a searchable lawyer directory.

Its web services on the other hand are not nearly so well regarded. The websites created and hosted are quite nice to look at but there isn’t a whole lot of variation in their design. That’s a major complaint they receive. They are also not market exclusive – the popularity of these sites and relatively low purchase price mean that there will inevitably be a number of very similar-looking websites in each market.

Justia.com hosted sites have also received complaints about their SEO-friendliness and overall performance – two incredibly important factors for remaining competitive in today’s online landscape.

That being said, a fully custom website can be very expensive to build so Justia.com’s website services are an affordable option for many just starting out. The breadth of the support it offers, from SEO services to pay-per-click advertising and social media can be a welcome addition for non-techies looking for an easy-to-use one-stop solution.

Has Justia.com received any complaints?

Essentially, Justia.com has three distinct parts of its business:

• The free legal resources
• The lawyer directory & Q & A feature
• Marketing Services

Its free legal resources are generally very well regarded. Justia.com has strongly established itself as a credible and trustworthy source of legal information. The site has made a significant investment to transcribe and stay up to date on laws, statutes, and regulations at both the state and federal levels.

The only complaint I’ve been able to surface for this aspect of the business is that some of its summaries do not include full information. Legal professionals state that it’s a great reference for researching the law, but full information should be verified from an official source.

The lawyer directory is also a solid service, but the fact that reviews/rankings come from other lawyers only and not the public seems a little limiting. Also, from the legal professional side, having a profile is pretty much a necessity, even if it’s becoming increasingly easy to get lost in the rabble.

Justia.com’s marketing solutions

Justia.com’s marketing solutions are most likely the area of the business that has received the most complaints. The designs of the websites themselves have been described as “cookie cutter” and the SEO-friendliness and web performance may not be as competitive as they should be.

It should also be noted that you can’t simply move your website off the platform if you’re unhappy with it. Justia.com websites are hosted by the company on a custom WordPress platform and their own servers. That means if you want to move it to another hosting company or look after it yourself on WordPress, you’re out of luck. If you decide to cancel your account or stop paying your bill, your site could just be deleted.

An organic web presence can take years to develop, so you need to be confident in the hosting services you pay for in the long term.

Should you add Justia.com to your marketing toolkit?

Justia.com’s ubiquity online, prominence of the website, and massive monthly traffic make it almost a necessity. Even if you don’t pay out for a Justia Connect Pro membership or a sponsored position in the directory, a basic profile is well worth the small amount of time taken to set up.

The wealth of up-to-date legal information for specializations and courts across the United States is also trustworthy and absolutely invaluable. The ability to set up regular email digests from various courts and specializations makes it free and easy to keep up to date with what’s going on in the courts.

As a free public service, Justia.com is definitely top-notch.

Justia Company Conclusion

The same can’t be said for their paid services. The paid membership and sponsored position may not raise your profile as much as you hope, depending on your market and specialization. 

The company’s web marketing service and websites may not be anything to write home about either but are offered at a price to make them competitive to those just starting out. They also have a pretty broad selection of services for those content to let others market their company online.

We encourage you to reach out if you have questions about Justia.com or other lawyer marketing services. We geek out about this kind of stuff. 

Please check on the Clearway Law blog regularly if you like this type of content.