For professionals
Every professional here holding an active license is listed free, whether they have heard of us or not. Nobody can pay to rank higher, and nobody can pay for the verified badge. That is not a launch promise. It is the product. A directory whose first result is the highest bidder is worth nothing to the person reading it, and you already know that, because you have paid for one.
What money cannot buy here, at any price
Three things, permanently
The ordering rule is published in full at directory-ranking and applied top to bottom. These sit outside it.
- Position in a ranked list. Not for sale. The order is licensed-in-state, then verified, then how recently we re-checked, then responsiveness once the boards open, then alphabetical. The only part you can improve is keeping your license in good standing.
- The Cusp Verified badge. It means we checked your license with the issuing body and it was active on the date shown. It means that and nothing else — not an endorsement, not a quality rating. A badge that claims more than it can support is worthless within a year.
- Inclusion, or a competitor’s removal. Being listed is free and not conditional on anything. Neither is anybody else’s.
And paying for a Profile earns no badge. The badges on a listing — Listed, Verified Pricing, Community Vetted — are claims about you: a license checked, fees published, readers heard from. Paying us is a claim about nothing. The moment money can buy a badge, every badge on the site is worth less, including the ones people earned. So a Profile buys you more room to say who you are, and no mark at all.
Why we will never take a share of a case
Directories usually approach this the other way round, so it is worth saying plainly: we will not take a percentage, a referral fee, or anything tied to whether you are hired. Not because we are principled about it — because for attorneys it is prohibited almost everywhere, and the person disciplined would be you, not us.
“A lawyer shall not compensate, give or promise anything of value to a person for recommending the lawyer’s services except that a lawyer may: (1) pay the reasonable costs of advertisements or communications permitted by this Rule; (2) pay the usual charges of a legal service plan or a not-for-profit or qualified lawyer referral service…”
ABA Model Rule 5.4(a): “A lawyer or law firm shall not share legal fees with a nonlawyer”, with exceptions internal to a firm.
The Model Rules are not themselves binding; your state’s version governs, and Arizona and Utah have moved. Rule 7.2 and Rule 5.4, read 6 September 2026.
So everything we charge for is a flat fee, quoted in advance, unrelated to outcome. That is the shape the rules permit, and it is why this page never uses the word referral: a qualified lawyer referral service is a defined thing and we are not one. We are a directory listing, priced like advertising.
What there is
- Name, firm, credential
- Verification status and the date we checked
- The source we checked it against, linked
- You do not have to do anything, and cannot opt out of being findable
- Correct anything we got wrong
- Add contact details and one paragraph
- Say whether you offer free consultations
- Say whether you take unbundled work — almost nobody advertises this and a great many readers want it
- Photograph and full biography
- Fee structure — flat, hourly, unbundled, sliding scale
- Courts you actually appear in
- Languages, areas of concentration
- No effect whatsoever on position
Claiming is free and always will be. A directory whose professionals correct it for nothing is a data asset. One that charges for corrections is something else.
Make one now, free
Before any of that: the handout itself is free and stays free. Go to the builder, type your firm name straight into the letterhead, pick your state, and press print. Your browser makes the PDF. No account, nothing to install, no charge, and no catch — you can do it fifty times for fifty clients and we will never know.
What the license buys is the maintained version: the state pages re-read and re-dated when the law moves, the other handouts as they land, and your name on all of them. If keeping it current is not worth $79 a month to you, use the free one forever. We would rather you did that than paid for something you do not need.
The toolkit
This is the part that is not about the directory at all, and it is the one we would rather you took.
The Cusp has more than eight hundred and fifty pages of state-checked material, a fifty-state citation apparatus, and client-facing checklists built from federal primary sources. You already make things like this for clients, in unbilled hours, and then watch them go out of date.
- Client handouts carrying your name. The Before you sign audit, the document checklist, the first-thirty-days list, your state’s process summary — as a PDF with your firm at the top, dated and sourced, that you hand across the table at a first meeting.
- State summaries kept current. The thing on every firm website that is three years old. Ours carries the date it was last checked, on the page.
- A client-facing roadmap link to send after a consultation, so the questions that come back to you are the ones only you can answer.
Founding rate — until 31 December 2026
The toolkit is $99 a month for one professional and $249 a month for a firm. Register before 31 December 2026 and it is $79 and $199, and it stays at that for as long as you stay. After that date the founding rate closes and the people who have it keep it.
None of this is on sale yet. The billing is not finished and we are not going to take a registration we cannot honor. The founding rate is held until 31 December either way — the date is a promise about the price, not a countdown to make you hurry.
A date rather than a number of places, deliberately. “Only twenty left” is not something you can check from outside, and we would rather use a deadline you can hold us to.
This is not a sale. It is what you are owed for taking something on before anybody else has, when the thing you are mostly buying is our promise to keep it current. If we do not keep that promise you should cancel, which takes one email to hello@thecusp.app and nothing else.
$99 a month for one professional. $249 a month for a firm — everyone at one address, no seat counting, no audit. Against a single billable hour either is a rounding error, and it is a hard-cost saving rather than a marketing spend. There is no bar-rules question here at all: it is a publishing license, not advertising.
The firm price is deliberately cheap relative to the single one. We would rather the whole office used it than police who is on the license, and a tool three partners hand to clients is worth more to both of us than a tool one of them remembers about.
It comes with an obligation on us, which we would rather state than be asked about: if something we published turns out to be wrong, it goes on the corrections page under our name, not quietly into the next version. That page exists already and it is not short.
Our prices are on this page because a price you have to ask for is a price that depends on what you look like you will pay. Whatever else you are considering, the question worth asking is whether the number is published before you get on a call.
The questions we actually get asked
| How did I get listed without being asked? | Your license is public and we read the issuing body’s own register. We list what it says and link to it. If anything is wrong, tell us and we will fix it free. |
| Can I be removed? | Yes, on request, and we do not argue about it. We will not remove a competitor on your request. |
| Does paying change my position? | No. The ordering rule is published and does not contain a price. This is the whole point of the exercise. |
| Is there a login? | Not yet, and we are not pretending otherwise. Today this is a form, and we verify you the same way we verified the listing — against the issuing body, by hand. Accounts come with the app. |
| Do you sell my details, or the readers’? | No. The site holds no reader accounts and no reader emails. Yours we keep to talk to you. |
| Who is reading this directory? | People already several pages into a state-specific problem. They arrive at your listing knowing what a QDRO is, what their residency rule is, and what their filing fee will be. |
Get in touch
Claiming a listing, the toolkit, or a correction — all three come through here. Give us the license number and the issuing body: we check every one against the register before we reply, which takes a few days and is the reason the badge means anything.
Thank you for your response. ✨
The Cusp sends divorcing people to a small panel of agents in each county — never more than five. There is no fee to join and no way to buy a place — what there is instead is a short training kit, a set of questions, and a license we check ourselves.