The documents were first requested during the 2008 presidential campaign under freedom of information acts. More than 2,200 pages were withheld, due to Alaskan privacy laws and other client-attorney privileges. The state has also not finished reviewing her emails from late 2008 through the summer of 2009, when Palin resigned as governor.

The New York Times has a searchable repository of Palin emails that includes a timeline of notable events. MSN, in association with Mother Jones, ProPublica and Crivella West has another, as does the The Los Angeles Times.

As the emails were just released, none of these archives is yet complete, but the organizations expect the scanning process to be complete soon.

The founders recognize a hole in the market and want to provide a user-friendly way to find attorneys or do research on attorneys recommended by others. They also want to turn Avvo in to an effective marketing vehicle for attorneys themselves.

As word of Avvo gets out in the legal community, I would imagine almost every attorney in America will probably conduct a vanity search and check their score. Many will be surprised to find that their scores are seemingly mediocre. For example, I conducted four searches on lawyers I worked with or know and none of them rose above a “7″ (out of 10 possible). These are all competent and successful lawyers in the San Francisco Bay Area — lawyers I would recommend. It’s not exactly clear why their scores were less than 7, except for missing potentially positive information.

Like LinkedIn, there will be rewards and, theoretically, an improvement in ratings if lawyers participate by claiming their profiles and soliciting recommendations from peers. The key to success here in the near term is building consumer trust in the ratings system. Avvo benefits in their regard from the general absence of any other direct competitors offering a similar, user-friendly ratings scheme (lawyers.com doesn’t have anything comparable for example).

Right now, however, the ratings scheme is probably not transparent enough (what’s the difference between a 6 and a 7, for example?). Accordingly, the site is currently most valuable as a way of checking (and potentially eliminating) attorneys recommended by others. As more content is collected and there’s more participation from lawyers and clients it will become a potentially valuable way to find lawyers on its own.