Avvo continues to get great press including a recent spot on Good Morning America. What fun.

I did a number of televised interviews while I was in New York last week. Here is another one from Dow Jones Market Watch. As more come online, I will post them in the names of reader interest and shameless self promotion.

Be televised!

Mark

I really haven’t slept much in the last couple of weeks. First, we had a great media tour in New York last week (more on that in a later post), and this week we are dropping a WHOLE NEW SITE on the legal world. Yep, Avvo is emerging from beta with a new look and feel, and I could not be more excited. With the new site, we are also launching Legal Guides. Holy cupcakes, Batman!

The New Avvo

Well, it’s not really new, it just looks new. When we launched last year, our site was almost entirely focused on our unique legal directory. But with Avvo Answers and, now, Legal Guides, we need to better communicate all that we do for both consumers and lawyers.

Also, as we promised from the beginning, we have been collecting your feedback and have made many of the changes you asked for. One of the biggest changes is our new search functionality. It is very cool in that it puts Avvo users just a click away from the lawyer, legal information, and legal advice they’re looking for. Looking for information on “divorce in Seattle”? Just type in those words, click, and you’ll be presented with top-rated divorce attorneys in Seattle, Legal Guides related to divorce, and questions (with answers) other people have asked about divorce.

Take the new site for a spin and let us know what you think of it. All feedback is appreciated, especially kudos for our development and design teams who worked tirelessly on this redesign for months.

Legal Guides

We’re also launching free Legal Guides to help consumers better understand their legal issues. Ok, so free online legal information is not a new concept, but we think Avvo Legal Guides have raised the bar a bit. Here’s why:

• They’re easy to understand: Legal Guides are written in a conversational style, free of legal jargon, in order to help people understand their legal issues without having to decipher confusing legal terms.

• They’re short: Ranging in size from 500 to 1,000 words, Legal Guides offer a succinct, 101-level overview of topics. Additional resources are suggested in the event that readers need more detailed information.

• They’re original: Each Legal Guide is an original, crafted by a qualified attorney or Avvo staff writer who can offer relevant, helpful advice for consumers on the topic.

• You can rate them: Readers can vote on the helpfulness of each guide and leave comments.

Maybe the best thing about Legal Guides is that lawyers love them. What’s not to love about free advertising? We are currently working with over 100 lawyers who are drafting Legal Guides in practice areas of their choosing. Would you like to write about immigration issues for divorces in California? Write about it, and it will always be your free piece of Avvo real estate.

Here are a couple of lawyer-drafted legal guides that are already getting a lot of attention:

• Dealing with IRS Officers – by lawyer Justin Dain Hein

• What to Do When Stopped for Driving While Intoxicated in Texas – by lawyer Kelly W. Case

A huge thank you to Holly Hetherington, the Legal Guides Business Manager, for herding the cats around this feature. There were many others involved, but Holly managed the process flawlessly. Holly and Shalini will be blogging in the coming weeks about the best way for consumers and lawyers to get the most out of Legal Guides.

Avvo: Creating the win-win for consumers and lawyers.

Onward!

Mark

If you are seeing this post at the top of the Avvo Blog page, the Avvo website is down.

This is not a mistake. This is not a test.

At this very moment, Avvo is emerging from beta and we have an awesome site to drop on all y’all. Stay tuned we will be back up momentarily.

In the meantime, check out Avvo’s new advisor, J. Craig Williams, below.

Stay Tuned!

Mark

Well sort of.

J. Craig Williams, the esteemed litigator, author, speaker, blogger, podcaster and all around good guy has joined Avvo’s Legal Advisory Board! We are thrilled.

While I only met Craig in person a couple of months ago, I first had the pleasure of meeting him on his Lawyer2Lawyer podcast with Bob Ambrogi. We had just launched Avvo and everyone and their brother (including Messrs. Williams and Ambrogi ) were taking potshots at Avvo. Some of it was deserved, but most of it was the legal profession simply trying to get their arms around something they had never seen before.

Rather than trying to tear us down, Craig was one who truly wanted to understand how we worked. We chatted on the phone a number of times, and the more we talked the more I realized that Craig was full of great ideas. The result was a very nice relationship that we built over the last year — so why not formalize our relationship and get Craig under the Avvo banner?

Welcome Craig. We are honored to have you as part of the Avvo family!

Mark

On July 24, the King County Washington Women Lawyers(KCWWL) organized an event at a local nonprofit called the Jubilee Women’s Center.  Jubilee is a wonderfully kept transitional home for up to 20 resident women.  The purpose of the event was to give advice on job hunting skills - focusing on interviewing skills in particular.  Having conducted mock interviews with a couple of the women, I came away impressed with both the KCWWL and Jubilee.  Jubilee’s largest annual fundraising event will be held on October 2 at 7:30 a.m. at the Westin in Downtown Seattle.  I plan on hosting a table - if anyone is interested in sitting at the table, please let me know.  A big thanks to Kristin Peterson, Jane Faulkner, Mamie Brown, Moni Law and Jessica Munk for organizing the event and exposing me to this worthwhile organization.

One thing that lawyers must pay attention to is search engine developments. The search engines, particularly Google, have become so good at indexing every little detail about all of us that to ignore their wares is sheer lunacy. Call it vanity, reputation management, or simply a good offense, all lawyers should make sure they are “googling” themselves on a regular basis to understand how the search engines are presenting them to potential clients, current clients, competitors, regulators, whomever.

But of course, with the Internet being the living beast that it is, the search engine game is already getting more complicated. Just when we are all getting used to simply “googling” ourselves, a new search engine has arrived with a splash and it is named “CUIL” – presumably a play on the way the 18-25 crowd says “cool” (often pronounced and spelled as “kewl”). God save our future generations’ spelling abilities . . . Anyway, check it out. It was started by a couple of ex-Googlites, so that gives it instant street cred.

I’m not sure it is kewl yet, but it is surely interesting. They attempt to get many more results above the fold and attempt to match much more text with photos. It also looks like they already have a ton of pages indexed. They do have a ways to go on the photo matching front: Just do a search for my name and you will see an Avvo article matched with a photo of the German comedian Mark Britton. Also, where they will surely live and die is not by the number of pages they have indexed but rather by how good they are at guiding users to the content for which they are looking. Hmmm . . . sounds like another website I know . . .

Be kewl.

Mark

Continuing in the vein that anything can be rated comes “50 bands, 50 states” - a state-by-state breakdown of the best band, best solo performer and best new artist from each state.

Yes, you can leave comments about the injustice of your favorite act not being named to the top spot. I’m sure Shalini will agree, however, to the choice of Seattle’s Fleet Foxes as the top new Washington band.

From Ed Murnane, president of the Illinois Civil Justice League, on LegalNewsLine:

“I think a roster of licensed lawyers in Illinois ought to be made public and available to the news media and citizens, just as a list of accredited doctors and other professionals is available; its just common sense, open government.”

And Ken Vanko of From the Center, has this to say:

“The notion that the Court can rely on a policy to keep an attorney list secret is so laughable that it does not merit discussion. What motivated the Court is not secrecy, but misplaced paternalism. Simply put, the Supreme Court does not think the average member of the public is intelligent enough to judge Avvo’s content on its own merits.”

Additional thoughts? I’d certainly be interested in hearing any cogent arguments for why information on Illinois lawyers requires such close guarding by the powers that be.

Here is a great piece on Avvo from the CBS affiliate in Los Angeles. What I love about this piece is the huge amount of love that Los Angeles attorney Dave Ring gives Avvo and the huge amount of free advertising he gets at the same time. I love to see the Avvo faithful do well.

Interestingly, I chatted with Dave tonight (who btw I did not know until we met at Dave’s offices to be interviewed) and he said that he got a client from Avvo just yesterday. Maybe it was the news piece, maybe it was just Avvo, but again it is great to see the Avvo faithful do well.

Be well.

Mark

p.s. Here’s another CBS affiliate piece from San Francisco. Can you tell we have caught on in California?

We here at Avvo were understandably disappointed that the Illinois Supreme Court didn’t do right by Illinois consumers and require that the state’s Attorney Registration and Disciplinary Commission make attorney licensing and disciplinary records as available to the public as the records for any other profession in the state.

These sentiments have been echoed in Illinois. From the Madison Record:

“The State Supreme Court set a troubling precedent last week when it ruled the state’s master roster of lawyers deserves extra-special protection . . . In the process it extended to Illinois lawyers an unprecedented right to privacy, a right denied to other Illinois professionals.”

The editorial notes that the Illinois Department of Financial and Professional Regulation recently released an online tool that allows consumers to look up the details on all Illinois physicians. Unlike the ARDC website, you don’t need a doctor’s name to use the DFPR tool - you can look up all of the doctors in your town or county. In fact, the DFPR site is quite Avvo-like, containing a deep set of data on each doctor, and even including areas doctors can update with info on insurance plans, honors awarded and community service.

Why doesn’t the ARDC at least make their site searchable by something other than name? It would be a simple change, and I’m not going out on a limb to venture a guess that the vast majority of Illinois consumers don’t know a lawyer by name.

Better yet, why not provide the data to Avvo so we can try and offer something more useful to the people of Illinois? The DFPR also apparently provides its attorney licensing data in electronic form in response to public records requests. And - horror of horrors - it provides such records even to commercial entities!

While the DFPR is using the internet to expose its records and enhance access, the ARDC is content to fall back on its dusty and antiquated 28-year old internal policy for handling requests for mailing lists. The price for this approach is less information for consumers and a heightened perception that attorneys consider themselves above the law. It’s high time the ARDC joined the DFPR in the 21st century.