There has been a considerable amount of commentary recently on Google’s purported penalizing of sites that sell paid links. See for example these comments:

Has this controversy carried over into the legal web space? I haven’t seen much evidence that it has. Generally, for any particular search on lawyers, the top ranked sites remain directory or portal services, most of which have some form of paid link inclusion. As a result, inclusion in these types of sites is still a valuable strategy for a law firm to improve its search results and visibility. Of course, there are other equally valuable tools such as the use of blogs. As I have written previously, the legal space does pose unique problems for ranking related to the difficulty of ranking lawyers and professionals generally. Personally, I think that directories and portal sites still provide a valuable service in that they provide an easy way for lay people to find a lawyer: I don’t think that it is in anyone’s interest to penalize such sites if they are well run. Full disclosure: I have an ownership interest in LawOne, a BC lawyers network. While not a directory service, LawOne does provide a “portal type” site for BC and Vancouver lawyers which is well ranked by Google.