The venerable U.S. News & World Report “Best Law School” ratings have been the subject of loads of acrimony of late – with schools dismissing the ratings on one hand while making changes to their admissions policies to help bolster the ratings on the other.

We’ve suffered our share of slings and arrows here at Avvo when it comes to ratings, so to U.S. News we say: We feel your pain. In fact, we’d like to help.

Avvo recently launched law school rankings, based on the average Avvo Rating attained by graduates of each school. It’s an imperfect system, of course – Avvo only has profiles for 85% or so of all U.S. attorneys, and we don’t have law school information for all of those lawyers. There are also some geographic disparities, driven by the fact that: a) not every state provides us with law school data; b) Avvo doesn’t have data on any attorneys for certain states; and c) the early adoption of Avvo by lawyers in the state of Washington causes some inflation in the rankings of schools with a high percentage of graduates in the state (you’re welcome, Gonzaga, Seattle University and UW).

Despite all of this, Avvo’s law school ratings track remarkably well with those of US News. Of the top 20 schools rated by that magazine, 17 are also in Avvo’s top 20. Of the three that are missing, two are “on the bubble” and only one, Washington University in St. Louis, is not even within the top 50 schools on Avvo. The unfortunate exclusion of WU is largely due to that fact that a certain Midwestern state continues to stonewall our request for records and we’ve just been too busy to press the issue.

So, to US News we say: We’ve got your back. Next time someone says your ratings are off-the-mark, just tell them the Avvo Rating makes your case.

This entry was posted on Monday, November 17th, 2008 at 7:47 am by Josh King, VP of Business Development and General Counsel and is filed under Josh King Posts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.