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:

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

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 dropped a WHOLE NEW SITE on the legal world. Yep, tonight 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 for lawyers. 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:

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?