How the CalegalLaw Growth Score Works — Methodology in the Open

Most attorney ratings ask you to trust a number whose recipe is a secret. The Growth Score takes the opposite bet: a single number from 0 to 100, computed the same way for every attorney in California, from factors we publish, on a schedule we publish — with the parts you can check yourself sitting in public State Bar records. This brief is the methodology, in the open, as promised.

The starting point: the official record

Every profile on this registry begins with the State Bar of California's public record — the same one you can look up yourself in two minutes. License status and public discipline history are public record under Business and Professions Code § 6086.1, and the registry is indexed from those official records. No attorney is added by paying to appear, and no attorney is removed by declining to pay. The roll is the roll.

The Growth Score sits on top of that foundation. It is not a license check — the license check is table stakes — but a measure of how an attorney's public practice presents and behaves over time.

The four factors

Each factor is scored 0–100 and contributes to the composite. The formula is applied identically to every licensee on the registry.

i. Visibility

How findable and complete is the attorney's public presence? A verified profile with current contact information, practice areas, office location, and consistent details across public sources scores higher than a bare listing. Visibility measures whether a member of the public can actually locate and evaluate the attorney — nothing more. It cannot be bought; it can only be completed.

ii. Responsiveness

When contact channels are exercised, does anything come back, and how quickly? Responsiveness reflects observed response behavior on the channels an attorney publishes — because for a person with a six-month government claim deadline, an unanswered inbox is a real cost, not a cosmetic one.

iii. Credentials

The verifiable record: an active license in good standing, years in practice, absence of public discipline, and status history drawn from the State Bar record. This factor is the most heavily anchored to official public data, and it is the reason a suspension or disbarment is reflected in the score rather than hidden behind it.

iv. Follow-Through

Consistency over time. Scores are recomputed nightly, and Follow-Through looks at whether the signals above hold steady — profiles kept current, responsiveness sustained rather than spiked, status maintained. A number earned once and abandoned decays; a number maintained compounds.

The rules the score lives by

• Same formula for everyone. No attorney gets a private rubric.
• Recomputed nightly. The score reflects the record as it stands, not as it stood last year.
• Nothing can be purchased. There is no fee that raises a score and no payment that suppresses one. Advertising does not exist on this registry.
• The inputs are checkable. The credential inputs live in the State Bar's public records; the presence inputs are visible on the open web.
• Corrections are honored. If an attorney believes a factual input is wrong — a stale address, a misread record — the fix is to correct the record, and the nightly recompute does the rest.

What the Growth Score is not

This part matters as much as the formula. The Growth Score is not a measure of legal skill, courtroom results, or the likely outcome of your case — no honest number could be, and we do not publish predictions or guarantees of any kind. It is not a ranking of who is "right" for you. It does not incorporate confidential client information, and it does not punish attorneys for taking hard cases.

It is a transparency instrument: a consistent, public, recomputed-nightly summary of the observable record, designed so that the ordering you see on the registry has a reason you can read.

Why publish the methodology at all?

Because the alternative is the status quo: directories where placement is sold, badges are subscription products, and the consumer cannot tell curation from commerce. A published methodology can be criticized — that is the point. When the factors are public, an error in the approach is discoverable and fixable in the open, and an attorney who wants a higher number has exactly one path: maintain a more complete, more responsive, better-standing public practice.

The score will keep evolving, and this page will change when it does — with the updated date above moving in lockstep. The methodology being public is permanent. The choice of counsel is always yours; the Growth Score just makes sure the information underneath that choice is earned in the open.