At Avvo, we are pretty big fans of the first amendment, especially when it relates to lawyer advertising. Remember the “Life is Short, Get a Divorce” billboards? Tasteless – yes. Effective marketing – maybe. Let’s leave it to Joe Consumer to cast judgment.

Well, the folks at WhoCanISue have just launched a slick, professionally produced TV spot that takes tasteless marketing to a new level:

Let’s be honest, the goal of this ad is to get the legal community to complain about it – thus introducing the service to scores of potential lawyers who may sign up. Even I swallowed the bait. But in the spirit of free speech, let me say this ad sucks. It paints a horrendous picture of not only the legal profession, but also of the American populace as a whole. The final question remains to be answered: Are there any lawyers who actually want to build their business like this?

Law.com just published the AM Law 100 listing of largest law firms. I thought it might be interesting to compare law firms’ gross revenue rankings with their online traffic rankings to see if there is any relationship between the two. By comparing the AM Law list with the Avvo BigLaw List, which stacks law firms by their Alexa rankings, I found a statistically strong positive correlation between the two. For statistic geeks – the result was a correlation coefficient of 0.57. [Note one shortcoming on the analysis is that the revenue data referenced 2008, while the Alexa rankings referenced that past 3 months of 2009.]

For those of you who snored through statistics – correlation does not prove causation. (i.e. Does lots of website traffic generate lots of law firm revenue? or is it the other way round? or is their no causal relationship at all.) To test the theory that web traffic can be a revenue generator for BigLaw, we ran the correlation between revenue per lawyer and the Alexa ranking. The math showed that this was statistically uncorrelated (correlation coefficient of -0.09).

Conclusions? The greater the website traffic, the bigger the BigLaw; however, traffic does not drive revenue per attorney. But I have to wonder about Skadden Arps, the one firm that fell in the top 10 for all three metrics: revenue per lawyer, gross revenue and Alexa ranking. Is it possible in this miserable legal economy, that their online marketing success is in some way responsible for financial performance?

Freakonomics is one of my favorite non-legal blogs to read.  Today, they point out that Catherine Rampell’s argument that ““jurisdictions that granted women the right to vote earlier generally had lower concentrations of women” is not  novel.  Ian Ayres notes that Akhil Amar made this observation back in 2005 in America’s Constitution: A Biography:

 

Much as the Founding Fathers had structured a Constitution whose promises of freedom and democracy sought to pull skilled European immigrants across the ocean, so their pioneer grandsons in the West evidently aimed to draw American women through the plains and over the mountains.

Data from the 1890 census provide some support for this admittedly crude theory. For every hundred native-born Wyoming males, there were only 58 native-born females. No other state had so pronounced a gender imbalance. Colorado and Idaho were the fifth and sixth most imbalanced states overall in 1890. The other early woman-suffrage state, Utah, had a somewhat higher percentage of women (thanks to its early experience with polygamy), but even Utah had only 88 native-born females for every hundred native-born males, ranking it 11th among the 45 states in the mid-1890’s. Also, the second, third, fourth, and seventh most imbalanced states — Montana, Washington, Nevada, and Oregon — would all embrace woman suffrage in the early 1910’s, several years ahead of most sister states. In all these places, men voting to extend the suffrage to women had little reason to fear that males might anytime soon be outvoted en masse by females (Amar, America’s Constitution, pp. 419-25).

 

• E&J Gallo flexes its muscle against The Spanish Table, a small specialty grocery store chain – alleging trademark infringement by the grocery for selling Gallo Pasta
• Wilson Sonsini releases term sheet generator tool
• Swedish judge in Pirate Bay case – Nordstrom’s impartiality in question
• Helmsley Estate record to date: $136M to charities $1M to dogs
• Lawyerist points to a troubling case where a New Jersey court found plaintiff employee had waived her attorney-client privilege by using an employer issued laptop to communicate with counsel – even though the employee was using a password-protected personal Yahoo account
• I can’t improve on this Consumerist headling: “Landlord Asks Mother To Pay ‘Early Termination Fee’ After Son Fails To Honor Lease By Dying”

Lawyers and Earth Day? Sure – there are almost nine thousand Environmental Lawyers on Avvo.

• Above The Law hosts its Inaugural Law Revue Contest (voting ends today at midnight) – I voted for Hot Bodies of Law (from the University of Virginia) – cannot resist a boy band parody and constitutional law pun combo
• Lawrence Lessig hearts Stephen Colbert
• Mortgage Fraud Blog parses a massive mortgage fraud scheme in Suffolk County, NY -  former Suffolk County Legislator George Guldi allegedly was a key participant
• Scott Greenfield notes Injustice in Seattle (@Injust_Seattle)
• Carolyn Elefant organizes a timely PinkSlips, Detours & OnRamps conference
• Milord A. Keshishian of Los Angeles IP Trademark Attorney on Surefire v Advanced Armament (silencer advertising)
• Mac Lawyer takes another look at Iphone v Blackberry (guess which one he prefers)

Some of you have noticed that your Avvo Answer notifications have been missing this week.  Last week we shipped a subtle, but fairly major change to Avvo Answers.  This includes giving the consumer a chance to flag an answer as “best” as well as some other fun stuff.  We also completely reimplemented notifications…. and we broke some stuff.  Sorry about that, but it all should be fixed now (as of a few minutes ago).

Incidentally, Avvo Answers got some TV PR this week and we’re overflowing with new questions – so there are plenty to choose from!

Look for more Avvo Answers changes in the next few weeks.

Avvo has been selected as an Official Honoree of the 2009 Webby Awards. Honorees are chosen by the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences from 10,000 submitted sites. The Webbys are the oldest and most prestigious online award and are described by They New York Times as “The Internet’s highest honor.”

For all you Avvo Answer participants our there… ever wonder how a question gets assigned to a particular practice area? Or maybe wonder why that DUI question was posted in Brain Injury?

Well, I’ll tell you.

We use what’s called a “classifier” to help the consumer pick the practice area their question belongs in. Given a block of text, the classifier returns the practice areas that most likely describe that text. To seed the classifier we mapped several thousand questions to practice areas by hand (btw, thanks for doing that Linnea :).

This classifier allows us to map questions to practice areas without human interaction and instantly. That allows us to send email notifications to participating lawyers as soon as the question is asked. That leads to quicker answers and a better experience for the consumer and the lawyer.

The classifier is pretty good, but it’s far from perfect, and we hate it when you receive a notification about a Child Custody question being posted in Car Accident as much (if not more) than you do. So, we’ve add a little feature to allow lawyers to correct the practice area for questions. If you see a question that is in the wrong practice area, fix it and we’ll use that data to make our classifier smarter which will make your question-answering experience better.

Here’s what it looks like (note that you have to be logged in as a lawyer to see this feature):

And then the form…