Fire up the Klieg lights and tidy up your tux. It is time to honor the five most notable legal sites of 2007. We focus on the sites that made news or should have made news -- not necessarily the best or the worst, but the ones that most altered the online legal landscape.

Where else to start than with www.avvo.com Avvo? When it arrived in June, with its promise to rate and profile every lawyer, it became the buzz of the blawgosphere.

In fact, the buzz started even earlier, given advance word of $14 million in venture capital, a board of directors that included Lou Andreozzi (ex-CEO of Lexis- Nexis) and an advisory board with Robert Hirshon, former president of the American Bar Association.

Avvo's concept of rating lawyers from one to 10 proved controversial at first, with critics citing examples of convicted felons better rated than renowned litigators. A class action was filed against it just nine days after launch.

Remarkably, Avvo listened to the critics and made changes in its rating system, assigning numerical rankings only when certain information is available. Avvo's motion to dismiss the lawsuit is pending as of this writing, but the uproar has died down. In fact, none other than old-school Martindale-Hubbell has since added the Avvo-like feature of client reviews tacked on to law firm profiles.

Next on stage: Public.Resource.Org. Back in 1872, John West had a good idea: publish and sell court decisions. His idea grew into the National Reporter System and, a century later, into the online research service Westlaw. Now Carl Malamud and his nonprofit organization want to upset that private-enterprise applecart by creating a public-domain repository of all federal and state case law.

In November, Malamud and the legal research company Fastcase announced an agreement to publish 1.8 million pages of federal case law in the public domain. The archive, to become available sometime in 2008, will include all U.S. courts of appeals decisions since 1950 and all Supreme Court decisions since 1754. Notably, this public database will come about with the cooperation of Fastcase, which has agreed to sell this case law with no strings attached.

Malamud was not the only one striving to decommercialize access to case law. Another was AltLaw, unveiled in August as a joint project of Columbia Law School and the University of Colorado Law School. Its purpose is similar: make federal case law easier to search and freely accessible to the public. It contains nearly 170,000 decisions dating back to the early 1990s from the Supreme Court and federal appellate courts.

The site's creators, Columbia's Timothy Wu and Stuart Sierra and Colorado's Paul Ohm, said the database will grow over time.

Next up for honors: the ABA Journal. In July, it revealed a head-to-toe redesign of its Web site. Of itself, the redesign was so sweeping as to command attention. But the big news was that, after years of allowing access only to ABA members, the magazine's entire site and all of its content became open to the public. That freed a valuable resource that had hitherto been behind locked doors. The site added back issues through 2005 and was slated to include even earlier years.

The site supplements the print magazine with added content, such as court opinions, interview transcripts and other materials. The site also includes two other notable features: Law News Now, a continuously updated feed of the day's legal news stories, selected by staff editors; and the Blawg Directory, an index of more than 1,000 blogs written by lawyers, law professors and law students.

Last but not least: A site that tends not to blow its own horn. Steadily, almost stealthily, founder Tim Stanley and his crew have built Justia into one of the best free legal research sites on the Web. After founding FindLaw and then selling it to West, Stanley started Justia modestly. At first, its focus was creating lawyer Web sites and blogs. At the same time, Stanley and his staff worked on public interest projects such as the Stanford Copyright and Fair Use Center and RecallWarnings.com.

Later Justia added its Supreme Court Center, pulling together a searchable collection of cases along with Supreme Court resources from all over the Web. It continued to add innovative features, such as BlawgSearch for searching law-related blogs and Blawgs.fm for searching law-related podcasts. In February, Justia launched Federal District Court Filings & Dockets, for searching and browsing federal dockets. Justia has expanded its offerings of court opinions and expanded its collections of links to legal research and legal practice resources.

Each of these sites, in its own way, helped redefine the future of how lawyers and their clients use the Web.

Robert J. Ambrogi is a Massachusetts lawyer and media consultant. He writes the blogs LawSites and Media Law.