Few readers will mourn the demise of the website Solicitors from Hell. But anyone who thinks its closure will mark the end of unauthorised online scrutiny of the profession is in for a shock.

I'm not talking about the certainty that some rogue will sooner or later set up a Hell-type operation beyond the reach of English courts, but of a wave of critical scrutiny empowered by releases of official data about the legal world.

Earlier this month, the Legal Ombudsman set the ball rolling by announcing plans to name names of solicitors and firms when they are subject to patterns of complaints, or when it is in the ‘public interest’ to do so.

There were grumbles from some quarters, but the legal profession has so far got off lightly compared with others.

Remarkably, the current government (so far) seems to be as keen on transparency in office as it was in opposition. A public sector transparency programme, driven by Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude, aims to lay bare all kinds of new datasets to the web, at least where public spending is concerned.

Apart from government credit card statements and the publication in full of contracts between government bodies and suppliers, the initiative has promised detailed maps of all reported crimes as well as sentencing data by court, including the age, gender and ethnicity of those sentenced, the sentence given, and the time taken at each stage from offence to completion of the case in court.

The sunlight of transparency is shining particularly brightly on the medical profession. Data to be made available, or already available, includes individual GPs’ prescribing habits as well as measurements of the clinical outcomes achieved by GPs and clinical teams. From next April, all NHS trusts will have to publish data on complaints (the website already publishes individual anonymous comments, generally grievances).

Some groups of specialists have taken transparency even further by publishing the success rates of individual, named, professionals. The process started in 2001 with death rates from heart operations. Although hugely controversial at the start, publication is now seen as a lever to improving quality through peer pressure.

Is it time for other professions to follow suit? Solicitors may argue that their failures are harder to count than corpses. But a great deal of work is already being done in the medical profession to develop objective measures of "softer" outcomes, which may well be appropriate to publicly rating other professionals' performance.

And publication of outcomes data is only the first step. The whole idea of transparency is that third parties can take the datasets, mash them up in new ways, and present them to a much wider audience. The results may not make for comfortable reading, but so long as they accurately represent fact, there is not a lot that the subjects can do about it.

Earlier this year, in a hefty report looking back at the experience of publishing heart-operation death rates, the Society for Cardiothoracic Surgery in Great Britain and Ireland, commented: 'Transparency has its challenges, but none that a determined and dedicated profession can’t overcome.'

Is the law a determined and dedicated profession?