While researching Avvo, consumers told us unequivocally that they wanted the ability to read what former clients had to say about their experiences with specific lawyers. Some in the legal community, however, questioned whether client ratings would really be useful to consumers. After all, wouldn’t only dissatisfied clients take the time to submit a rating? And do consumers really know if they should be satisfied with a lawyer’s work? Won’t clients that “lose” their case be dissatisfied, even if the lawyer represented their case well?

At least those were some of the assumptions.

Six weeks after our launch, consumers have submitted over 1,500 client ratings to Avvo. And 80% of them are positive. The number doesn’t surprise me, as it is in line with the findings from an Ipsos survey that we commissioned namely, that only 12% of consumers surveyed were not satisfied with their lawyer’s performance. But it may surprise those who assumed that the ratio of positive to negative ratings would be reversed. Here are a couple of examples (click on the Client Ratings tab on each profile):

http://www.avvo.com/attorneys/92008-ca-randall-walton-305156.html

http://www.avvo.com/attorneys/95032-ca-j-peironnet-285977.html

There are a couple of points to take away from this. First: perception and reality can be worlds apart, particularly regarding relatively new and unfamiliar technologies. Second: lawyers who embrace the Internet including new features like client ratings — as a marketing vehicle have a lot to gain. Every lawyer knows that a client referral is the most powerful way to attract new clients, and client ratings enable those referrals to be broadcast to the world. Particularly for solos and small-firm lawyers, there may be no more powerful marketing tool available to them.

On a related note

For everyone following the proposed class action against Avvo, I wanted to raise a disappointing development. There was a big media event in Seattle called the “Naked Truth,” where a number of influential reporters were speaking. Seats were limited so we signed up as soon as we learned about it. We also thought that Avvo might come up, so we wanted to be sure to be there. Oddly, the names of all three Avvo attendees vanished from the RSVP list (which was posted on an open wiki), so that we were unable to attend.

Thanks to Kevin Flaherty at Wetpaint and his blog post entitled, “A wiki “who done it“, we have learned that “someone” from the PR firm of Firmani and Associates made the deletion. Firmani and Associates is the PR firm for Hagens Berman Sobol Shapiro, the law firm that filed a class action against Avvo nine days after we launched. Mark Firmani responded to the wetpaint blog by saying, “I can assure all involved that if someone from my shop did delete anyone from the RSVP list, it was done in error. My sincere apologies to anyone we may have inconvenienced.” Oddly, it appears the only names Firmani’s firm deleted from the RSVP list were Avvo names, so I guess he was talking to us. He also fails to note that he has any connection to Hagens Berman or Steve Berman specifically. How disappointing.

On behalf of Avvo, I would just like to go on record to say how sad it is that Berman’s camp would apparently stoop to this. It is one thing to try to chill and censor our opinions through the courts, but it is another to stalk us in our everyday lives. This type of activity is bad for everyone especially the legal profession.

Mark

p.s. John Cook at the Seattle PI has also blogged about the Firmani deletion here.

After launch many of you gave feedback about the features on Avvo. From that feedback we realized that one of the biggest issues is the inability to merge attorney profiles. Many of you are licensed in more than one state and thus have more than one Avvo profile and that can be a real annoyance to keep up to date.

With our most recent feature release we solved this by changing the process of claiming profiles. Now, when you claim your second, third, forth, etc profiles, the system automatically merges your bar records as well as your peer endorsements into your first profile. This is great because it puts all your bar experience together in one profile (which is good for consumers to see and it can also positively effect your Avvo Rating). It also makes updating your Avvo presence much easier since everything is located in one profile.

Now, if you’re one of the many lawyers that has already claimed more than one profile and would like them merged into one, give us a call or send us a support request and we’d be more than happy to merge them for you. It won’t take more than a couple minutes.

As we add new states to our system, you will be able to find new profiles that are yours and claim them. Those profiles will then be automatically merged into your existing profile.

Hopefully this will be a much better experience for lawyers and consumers.

Keep the feedback coming. We’ll keep the improvements coming.

I wanted to alert everyone to an article posted today in the New York Law Journal entitled, “N.Y. Federal Judge Strikes Down Many New Attorney Ad Rules.” To access the article you need to register with the New York Law Journal; however, registration and the article are free.

As this decision demonstrates, there is clearly tension between the mutually admirable goals of, on the one hand, getting consumers the information they need in hiring a lawyer, and on the other, preventing lawyer advertising that may be misleading or otherwise damaging to the legal profession. Avvo has been pulled into this debate a bit, as commentators ponder Avvo’s place within the various states’ attorney advertising rules. Dennis Kennedy raised the issue during our This Week in Law podcast and Gary Blankenship at the Florida Bar News has written about it here and here .

Interestingly, according to the New York Law Journal article, Greg Beck of Public Citizen litigated the New York ad rules case. Greg also wrote a blog post regarding how Avvo fits into states’ advertising rules entitled, “Is it Unethical to Match Consumers with Lawyers Online?” Greg’s post is very balanced and raises some interesting points regarding Avvo. In particular, he says, “But critics should keep in mind that websites like [Avvo] have at least the potential to provide consumers valuable and badly needed assistance in selecting a lawyer. Currently, many consumers are forced to choose an attorney, essentially at random, from the phone book. Indeed, the FTC has written to some of the states prohibiting legal matching services to explain how they are good for consumers.”

It will be interesting to see how all of this plays out hopefully we all be able to find a good balance that gets consumers the information they need while preserving the integrity of the legal profession.

Mark

Larry Bodine posted today about The Essential Little Book of Great Lawyering. I’d like to recommend Selling the Invisible, by Harry Beckwith. While this isn’t Lawyer specific – it delves into the mind of a consumer who is considering a service purchase. Beckwith’s beginning premise is that it is very difficult to evaluate the quality of a service – there is very little opportunity to kick the tires. Instead, consumers look to clues to a service’s quality. (Avvo is doing our best to help consumers kick the lawyer tires.) Beckwith explains that, for the same reason most people buy the orangest orange in the grocery store, even though the color is unrelated to the taste, consumers will look for lawyers who exude lawyerness. (How many lawyer pictures have you seen in front of the obligatory bookcase full law books?) The book is a short, fun, eye-opening read, full of examples that you’ll use again and again.

Over the past couple of weeks we’ve had the opportunity to participate in podcasts with some well-known legal bloggers.

Last week Mark spent around 90 minutes on Denise Howell’s This Week in Law podcast, with other guests Ernie Svenson, Dennis Kennedy and Mazyar Hadayat.

This week, both Mark and I chatted with J. Craig Williams and Robert Ambrogi on their Lawyer 2 Lawyer podcast.

If you’re interested in learning more about Avvo, the reasons for creating the website, and our thinking on some of the issues that have been raised since we launched in early June, I think you’ll enjoy both programs.

You’ve heard Avvo talk about the difficulty Joe Consumer has in finding an attorney. Mark Draughn’s description of Finding a Traffic Lawyer offers great insight into the mindset of someone looking for an attorney, the criteria he considered (not necessarily what you’d think), and using the web to find one (FindLaw this time; we’d recommend a search on Avvo for Chicago Traffic Ticket Lawyers.) Most importantly, he acknowledges he doesn’t know how to go about “trying to pick a good lawyer.”

A Public Defender offers a complete review of the post, taking into account the salient legal marketing issues.

I want to quickly highlight three articles that have been published about Avvo of late, one by Adam Liptak at the New York Times (“On Second Thought, Let’s Just Rate All the Lawyers“)* and two by Carolyn Elefant one on Law.com (“Avvo Files Motion to Dismiss“) and the other on her own blog, My Shingle (“A Tale of Two Lawyer Ratings Systems.)”

These articles echo at least two thoughts that have “crossed my mind” since we became the target of a proposed class action lawsuit.

The first is the fairly simple observation that Avvo’s fate should be decided in the court of consumer opinion, not a Federal courtroom. As Adam says in his article, “But just because the site is a work in progress does not mean it should be suffocated in its infancy by thin-skinned lawyers. As it refines its methods and gathers more information, including critiques of lawyers by their clients, Avvo could well provide an important and valuable service.” Carolyn adds some similar commentary to her post “Avvo Files Motion to Dismiss” by saying, “Avvo is representative of a trend that we are going to see as we move into the Internet Age. With so much information online about lawyers and other service providers, it’s only natural that some companies will try to aggregate and simplify it. Whether that is useful or not depends on what consumers need and want – and I don’t purport to know the answer to that.”

The second thought is that, with all of the scrutiny that Avvo’s rating has already received, why have the plaintiffs in the proposed class action not taken similar issue with other attorney rating systems many of which have been around for years? Carolyn’s post, “A Tale of Two Lawyer Ratings Systems” hit this head-on when she begins with a long description of a rating service that sounds like Avvo, but ultimately is not (it’s Martindale Hubbell). And after some commentary, she concludes, “So, one of these ratings systems is sued, while the other is not. And if you’re wondering about the reasons for the differential treatment, I can think of at least one: consider the ratings of the class action’s lead plaintiff by [Martindale Hubbell] and [Avvo].” [Editorial note: Martindale Hubbell rates this lead plaintiff, John Henry Browne, "AV" (it's highest rating) and Avvo currently rates him 5.5 or "Average."] Adam Liptak takes a more aggressive tone by saying, “Legal publications these days are full of lists of supposedly stellar lawyers, which are a nice way to generate advertising and good feelings but perform no particular service. Avvo’s rankings at least take account of lawyers’ shortcomings.”

Now, I take some issue with Adam on this point because I do believe that other rating services help indicate to the consumer which attorneys have built up a respectable-enough body of work so that these services take note. That is why we take them into account in calculating the Avvo Rating. However, I do agree that the reason we are being singled out is because we alert the consumer to misconduct in a lawyer’s background.

That brings me back to the title of this article: Three articles, leading to two thoughts, which lead to the ultimate conclusion that there is only one true Avvo. :-)

Mark

* This article requires a NYT subscription for access. You can get a 14-day free trial subscription, or maybe try Googling for it. Possibly someone has reposted it for free.

Today we are pleased to release a new feature on Avvo – the ability to claim your lawyer profile via e-mail. If Avvo has managed to locate your e-mail address from public sources, and you can access e-mails sent to that address, you can now claim your profile simply by clicking on a link in a verification e-mail that Avvo sends to you. You can use this feature as an alternative to entering your credit card information.

Look for more exciting features coming out in the next few months!

- Justin, Avvo Development