Martindale’s rating system IS different. It sends out emails to lawyers in the community if they know the email address. This is good in that it gets your rating requests to a large number of lawyers in your community at once – something Avvo doesn’t do.

One problem with Martindale, for a subset of attorneys, is that the automatic mailings go out to the attorney’s community only. Those of us that work in sub-specialties on a state-wide level are well known only to the attorneys in that subspecialty, so Martindale can’t ask those attorneys for reviews unless the attorney tells Martindale about those people to ask for a rating. Martindale also gives an advantage to big firm attorneys, who seem to rate each other more highly than small firm attorneys. Greater numbers win.

Avvo’s fault is that it relies very heavily on other attorneys’ reviews to raise your ratings – and I don’t think Avvo intended marketing ability to indicate a great attorney, but that is the way it seems to me. It’s a similar problem to Martindale, that of friends rating friends, but at least Martindale doesn’t let “baby attorneys” get top ratings.

In my opinion, a “baby attorney” is NEVER a 10.0 – I don’t care who he is. When I see a 6 year attorney from some middling law school rated a 10, and a 35 year attorney from Stanford/Harvard who I know is the best in the business, I take the Avvo ratings system a little less seriously. Martindale has it right on valuing experience – you can only reach CV at 5 years, BV at 10 years and AV at 20 years. I also like that no rating is given by Martindale if the attorney doesn’t rate a V for very ethical – those people shouldn’t even be on the map. “Ethical” comprises more than “no discipline” and Avvo doesn’t recognize that in its rating system.

I’ll use both rating systems – but I want Martindale to update their email addresses, and send snail mail to my subspecialty group, so a complete rating can be done.

I just wanted to take a few minutes to clarify a few things you mentioned.

As you know AV and BV is pretty well understood by the legal market; we hope the addition of a numeric makes the ratings more understandable and familiar to the general consumer like me. Of course, numeric ratings weren’t created by either of our companies, having been around in other services for years. Leveraging this into the legal sphere is a great opportunity.

Our General Ethical Standards rating has always been the core component of our ratings program, along with Legal Ability. We find that peers take their profession extremely seriously and have often rated lawyers as unethical, even before any disciplinary actions were in place. If we are informed of a disciplinary action, we take immediate steps to investigate, and if the action is warranted, we will drop their rating. Is it our job to showcase the actual disciplinary action? You could argue the case on both sides, and, at the end of the day, a user needs to know who the right lawyer is to hire or refer work to, and the rating is one of many key criteria we provide to inform that decision.

For existing CV rated lawyers, we have transitioned them to Rated 2.9. All lawyers will be reviewed on the 1.0-5.0 scale in the changed program, including all existing AV, BV and CV.

Pay for play? No way. We rate all lawyers on our database, subscribers and non-subscribers. They can use their rating in their own marketing purposes, even if they choose not pay to display their rating on our sites. They do not pay to be rated.

Sure, 10 years is a long time. Our ratings process is 100 percent reliant on the participation of the legal community, and even with a million lawyers in our database, it will take time for every lawyer in our system to be reviewed in the changed program. Over the next few years as we transition, we will be continuing the conversations with the legal community to learn from them and improve the program as needed.

Finally, thanks again for your feedback. We look forward to the continued dialogue in our shared objectives in supporting our users to find the right lawyer to meet their needs.

Eslin
Director, Product Management, Client and Peer Review Ratings