In this case, it's the other way around -- the DC lawyers must register with (and pay) the bar association in order to be allowed to practice in the district. The registration and disciplinary information is public data, but the bar association is usually the only organization that actually holds the data (since they were the ones who collected it in the first place). So, in many cases, including this one, the only way to get this public information is by going through the bar.
We went through something similar about a year ago in New Jersey. The AP article has fallen into the archives, but the Seattle PI wrote a blog post about it: http://blog.seattlepi.nwsource.com/venture/archives/135524.a...
Question: Why did Avvo scrape the DC bar's web site after the TOS was changed to prohibit them from doing it?
I do know that if the DC bar provided this public data to people and companies directly, like most of the other other state bars have, this wouldn't be an issue. Unfortunately, the only provider of the data is the bar's own website, so retrieving the data directly from the site is the only real option. Terms of use may or may not change whether that's ok, but we'll have to wait and see what happens.