"Zillow, the company that has shaken up the real estate market a by providing home valuations online.)"
Is there any evidence that Zillow is having any impact on the real-estate market?

Law is closer to healthcare than real estate in terms of the consumer relying on professional expertise. We still haven't seen anything in real estate that proves it can be disruptive, but at least in that area you can make the argument that information is the main thing that differentiates the consumer from the expert, and therefore the Internet can close the gap in a big way. Not so true in law or healthcare. Just like what happened in healthcare, I suspect a web property is more likely to turn into a casual information site than anything disruptive.

Jennie, good question. I should clarify. I meant "shaking up" more in the sense that Zillow is creating a lot of angst out there, because it is one more tool that helps regular buyers and sellers "disintermediate" the real estate agent (see this zinger press release by PropertyShark). Zillow claims a 7 percent margin of error, and in some markets like SF, a 5 percent margin of error. Based on my own experience with agents, who veered all over the map in negotiating what price to sell my last house (and certainly by more than 7 percent), there may be more logic and use to Zillow than some agents would like admit. I know I would certainly consult it if I were selling a house again, and that I'd use it to confront my agent about the price they are recommending. (I may be unusual, but I ended up buying my last house without an agent, in part because of the transparency out there now; I haven't regretted it). What I didn't mean to claim, however, is that Zillow is somehow succeeding financially. That is too early to tell.

For some reason, the URL for the "zinger" press release I referred to above didn't show up. Here it is: http://www.primezone.com/newsroom/news.html?d=93604

I think Dorrian is right.

For seven years I have worked for an attorney. If we could figure a way to make our web presence more useful to clients, we would. Legal services are not about information - if they were, they would be ripe for web disruption - they are about knowledge.

Any attorney will tell you that the result you obtain in a court is highly dependent upon the Judge, the day, the opposing attorney, their own client and LASTLY, the law.

As someone working in this area for several years now, I hope that this turns into a service upon which customers can rely for quality information and to which attorneys and legal service providers can turn for effective dissemination of information.

After contributing free content to Law Guru for several years, I started Prison Services Project on a rock-bottom shoe string. In doing research on the side, I've gained a pretty good idea of the enormous potential this service represents and teh tools that will make it fly.

I have to say that with such generous start-up funding and the top talent that it has attracted, it could easily revolutionize the legal market.

Yes, law is about knowledge, but knowledge relies on data. The more data the consumer has, the more finely honed will be the legal issues they present to counsel. The more prepared counsel is the more likely they are to recommend ADR over litigation and the higher the satisfaction in the legal result should ADR not prove appropriate.

Bravo!