The primary reason that we’ve enabled client ratings is because consumers told us, emphatically, that they want to know about former clients’ experiences. I agree with you that the more ratings posted about an individual attorney, the more help they are to a prospective client. But even a “handful” of ratings is better than what most consumers have access to today, which is no client feedback at all.

I also agree with you that client ratings, by themselves, should not be the basis of a consumer making a choice of attorney. Rather, client ratings provide another set of opinions — in addition to the Avvo Rating and peer endorsements — that consumers can evaluate when going through the process of choosing a lawyer. Our belief is that the more relevant information available, and the more opinions that can be heard, the better.

Finally, let me clarify a couple of your observations regarding the Avvo Rating and the search results page. The Avvo Rating does not take into account client ratings, but does take into account peer endorsements, because in our opinion peer endorsements are a form of industry recognition. And you are correct that the Avvo Rating could differ from client ratings. As I stated above, the Avvo Rating is an opinion, and client ratings are opinions, and these opinions won’t necessarily be the same (in fact, client ratings could differ from client to client). As for the order in which lawyers appear in the search results, it’s not necessarily true that a lawyer with a low Avvo Rating will sort lower than a lawyer with great client ratings. Our search results algorithm takes into account several factors, and it is evolving (as does Google’s) in an effort to serve up the most relevant results to consumers.

Apologies for the long post, but I hope this clarifies some of your questions.

Paul

I believe client reviews, while in theory compelling, will always be somewhat problematic:

1) Are a handful of client reviews out of potentially hundreds sufficient to tell a story?
2) Are clients who had particularly bad experiences willing to post their experiences?
3) Does a bad review say more about the client or difficulty of the case, or the quality of the attorney?
4) Has the attorney encouraged certain clients to post a review?

My guess is where reviews will be most useful as part of an evaluation is when there is a strong pattern of positive (or negative) reviews.

On your site if a search is performed (“Criminal Defense”, “Seattle”) I noticed the column labled “Client Rating” appears not to work. So, Geoffrey L. Burg, the first on the list, has next to his name “Be the first to review this lawyer” even though he has in fact received reviews. Also, my understanding (from Avvo, actually) is client (and peer) reviews are not used to determine the Avvo Ranking/Best Match. In theory, then, an attorney with a rating of 8.2 and far down the list (and not likely to be seen by many visitors) could nonetheless have far more positive client reviews than everyone higher on the list (either through the Avvo Rating or Best Match). Is this correct and, if so, doesn’t this create the potential whereby clients may say one thing about an attorney, but Avvo another?