Client Reviews in the House
January 24th, 2008 by Ben VandenBos, Software Design Engineer
Many of you have noticed how the Client Review portion of our site seems slightly disconnected (you can’t sort by client ratings, you can’t filter to lawyers that have client reviews, etc
January 27th, 2008 at 11:27 pm
Ben, what I immediately have a question about is this: although attorneys have the ability to respond to a client review, and although the client may be breaking attorney-client privilege in their reviews, we attorneys need to be careful in responding with anything that reveals attorney-client privilege (broken by the client or not) or be subject to claim/grievance. Yet, it’s nice to have the ability to respond, but I think it may set up a false sense of relief for attorneys. Due to the unique nature of the attorney-client privilege, we attorneys cannot necessarily respond to a bad review like our clients can when they receive bad reviews. I guess that’s one of the main points of contentions about publishing these reviews to begin with!
January 29th, 2008 at 11:30 am
Thanks for you comment, Benjamin. I’m the person who reads each review that’s submitted and publishes them to the Avvo site. I think you make an important point, that commenting could create a difficult situation for you and other attorneys. Since I’ve started publishing the reviews I’ve seen more positive than negative. So, I hope there aren’t too many situations when you will need to comment. However, it’s important to remember that if someone says something about you don’t agree with, don’t you want the ability to respond? Even if you feel your client has broken the attorney-client privilege by posting a client review, don’t you think it’s possible to respond without doing the same thing? At Avvo we place a lot of value on the power of customer reviews and know how much weight this kind of word-of-mouth brings to the legal market. Without the ability to review lawyers then Avvo would just be another lawyer listing site.
November 17th, 2008 at 12:03 pm
Are you aware that your web page is displaying many characters that are not U.S. standard English characters? For example, in Erin’s entry of 1/29/08 there is the sentence, “Thanks for you comment, Benjamin. I’m the person who reads each review that’s submitted…” I’m not sure what shows on your screen, but on my screen the contraction for “that is” (just before the end of the quote) shows up as “that” plus Euro currency and TM symbols. Many more such instances show throughout your website. I checked my browser (Internet Explorer on Vista) and confirmed that the language setting is American English.