The leadership council of the State Bar is still resisting a FOI Advisory Council ruling that its list of licensed lawyers must be a public record.
At a meeting in late fall, the council backed legislation to try to trump that part of the FOI law that mandates disclosure of any existing public-record database.
In the past, the Bar made $50,000 a year selling the list exclusively to nonprofit and for-profit groups that offer continuing-education classes (although it had asserted that an obscure section of the state code restricted sales solely to nonprofits). The VSB practice, whether involving private businesses or nonprofits, came under fire in early ’03 after Maria Everett of the FOIA office ruled such lists must be given to anybody, at actual cost or less.
A Bar spokeswoman said “privacy,” not money, was the issue. Just over one-half the licensed lawyers do not practice law, and Bar leadership wants them protected from getting junk mail and dislikes having to disclose their mailing addresses (often, home addresses).
The Bar admits the public needs to check for lawyers’ disciplinary actions, but it wants disclosure limited to “look-ups” by individual name only.
No individual-lookup rule exists with any other public record in Virginia, or any other public database.
As of September, 23,699 names were on the VSB list.
The list was sought this past year by Michael Ravnitzky, a FOIA activist based in Washington. After “unbelievable amounts of hassle,” he got turned down because he was not a Virginia resident.
As usually happens after such denials, Ravnitzky then found somebody living in Virginia to renew the request.
Miffed because of the trouble he’d encountered, he then offered free Excel spreadsheet files to one and all, listing all 23,699 lawyers by name and city or county (but without street addresses).