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I am from Hidalgo County, an area that is in deep South Texas, which is often described as a Judicial Hellhole. This means that it is a particularly plaintiff-friendly area of the country. My late father was a plaintiff's attorney in Hidalgo County and he had many tales of how his fellow plaintiff's attorneys would craftily get clients. However, those crafty schemes and gimmicks would come to a grinding halt when Texas imposed strict Barratry laws.

For those who are not familiar with Barratry, it is the unlawful solicitation of clients. A good example of Barratry is an attorney coming to your hospital room after you have been in an accident and trying to sign you up. The current Barratry regime usually does not allow for unsolicited outreach (outside of some isolated incidents) to potential clients. This is a problem that has been a thorn in the side of plaintiff's attorneys for quite some time.

One startup out of Dallas, Texas seems to have figured out a workaround to this problem and in doing so is offering attorneys unprecedented access to potential clients. The startup is called MyAccident.Org and it is run by Andrew Higginbotham.

Higginbotham is not a lawyer himself—he is an entrepreneurial mind that noticed that his attorney friends had a hard time getting new clients under the current Barratry regime. It seemed that their only options to get more clients were to take out expensive ads or to engage in equally expensive fights for advertising space on websites like Avvo.com.

Unfortunately, those options proved to be both costly and questionably effective. So these attorneys still focused heavily on word of mouth. Higginbotham had made a significant amount of money making free credit report sites before the Dot Com bubble popped and saw an opportunity to make money in a similar way in this market.

He did this by syncing his website with publicly available (yet pretty hard to access and navigate) databases of accident reports and populated a map with all of the accidents that have happened with all the details of the accidents minus the names of the parties involved or any other personal information. People who had just gotten into wrecks need to access their accident reports in order to file claims, and his site gives people two options when accessing their reports on his site: 1. Locate and access your accident report via his site and pay a one-time fee of $20 or; 2. Consent to attorneys reaching out to you about your incident and get your accident report entirely for free.

This incentive, according to MyAccident.Org, not only serves as an excellent funnel to convert people into marketing leads for his company, but the consent portion of the two options provided serves as a workaround to Barratry. According to MyAccident.Org, once you have voluntarily come to their site and voluntarily consented to attorney's reaching out using the information that you provided, an attorney utilizing leads generated from this system should not bear Barratry liability.

To bolster their argument, they cite Comment 1 to Rule 7.03 of the Texas Disciplinary Rules of Professional Conduct, which permits marketing via a website if it is accessed by an interested person and the information provided on attorneys is relevant and truthful, and Comment 5 to Rule 7.2 of the American Bar Association Model Rules for Professional Conduct, which states that "A lawyer may pay others for generating client leads, such as Internet-based client leads."

If their system does work as seamlessly as they claim it does within the law, it could be a gamechanger for plaintiff's firms across the nation, and the shockwaves of change would not be limited to car crashes. Damages from storms and other incidents that generate public reports would be low hanging fruit for their system and the next logical step for them.

Although we may never return to the old ambulance chasing days that my dad would describe to me as a kid, it seems that MyAccident.Org may have found a way to bring back the access to clients that plaintiff's attorneys had in the past with no fear that they may lose their license for reaching out to potential clients.

Samuel Garcia is a recent graduate of Harvard Law School and currently a Senior Associate at Amplo, a Venture Capital fund.