Well, the end of 2009 is finally upon us. What a crazy, wonderful and busy year it has been for Avvo. A few highlights before we pack things up and head into 2010:

2009 was the year where Avvo’s “win-win” for consumers and lawyers really kicked-in. On the consumer side, we helped millions make better legal choices, whether it was getting them free legal advice in our legal guides and Avvo Answers or helping them choose the right lawyer in our industry-leading lawyer directory. Nothing was more gratifying than the letters and emails we received from everyday people telling us how Avvo helped them during an emotional time. Getting consumers the information and guidance they need to make informed legal decisions shouldn’t be so rare; but sadly it is, and on that front Avvo is happy to be the vanguard of today and the stalwart of tomorrow.

For lawyers, put simply, we delivered them a dump truck full of business in 2009. With Avvo becoming one the of most-trafficked legal directories this year and, in so doing, driving 150,000+ contacts for lawyers each month, we created a fire hose of demand for great lawyers. I often quote the noble words of Harold Goldner, a Pennsylvania Employment lawyer and Twitteraholic. Harold tweeted earlier this year, “I’m not yet convinced of what my LinkedIn profile can do. Twitter drives traffic to my blawg. Avvo generates business.” Amen brother. As we hear more and more lawyers echo Harold’s sentiments, it only reinforces our core theorem: I + G = B, where “I” and “G” are more Information and Guidance for consumers, and “B” is more Business for great lawyers.

Avvo also grew a lot this year in both product and personnel. For product growth, we added enough new lawyers to our directory in 2009 to bring our coverage to 90% (i.e., we now rate and profile 90% of the practicing lawyers in the United States). That nicely reinforces our position as the World’s Largest Legal Directory (someone call the Guinness folks!). We also saw Avvo Answers participation for both consumers and lawyers skyrocket. Avvo Answers is now getting around 20,000 questions per month supported by a very high answer rate from lawyers. It’s simply fantastic to have such viral growth without having to spend millions of dollars on low-ROI television campaigns. As I often say, our customers are our best advertisers. Finally, we launched Avvo Pro which is a great product for those lawyers who want to turbo-charge their Avvo Profile. You only need to see all of the “Pro” badges in our directory to understand the growth in (and power of) Avvo Pro.

As for growth in personnel, our advertising sales hit warp speed over the summer, which caught us a bit off guard. We had been so focused on delivering the “free” Avvo that we had to shift gears and get a team in place to manage the “paid” Avvo. This led to us to hiring eight new sales people at the same time we were moving into new space. While it took some operational scrambling, we are now all snug as a bug in a rug in the new Avvo offices, and things are humming along quite nicely. Rapid personnel growth is always a challenge, but the team handled it with aplomb and we are now set up to attack 2010 with deliberate abandon.

Even as I write all of this, I really don’t want 2009 to end . . . until I start to think about 2010. I could say something poetic like, “I feel like we are just getting started,” but the reality is we did just get started. We launched in June 2007, and already we have established a better way for lawyers and consumers to tango. Could 2010 be as productive? Could we continue to get consumers more help and lawyers more business? Could Avvo’s growth curve continue to be so steep? Could we introduce a new dance?

Yes, yes, yes and yes. See you in 2010.

Mark

Florida lawyers, your Byzantine and largely extra-constitutional scheme of attorney advertising rules is going to get even uglier. The Florida Bar is poised to issue guidelines implementing that state’s recent Supreme Court edict around the applicability of the ad rules to attorney websites. In addition to requiring that users affirmatively accept a disclaimer before visiting the inside pages of an attorney’s website, the guidelines will also specify that social media sites are also subject to the rules. Wait, there’s more – Facebook friend requests, invitations to connect on LinkedIn (and maybe even following someone on Twitter?) will be considered impermissible in-person solicitation.

Does the Florida Bar Standing Committee on Advertising not take counsel on First Amendment issues? Unless the guidelines are very narrowly focused on just the most blatant advertising-based uses of social media, they’re haven’t a chance of passing constitutional muster. If there’s a silver lining here, it’s that these changes are significant enough that some attorneys are sure to seek federal court help in striking them down.

In addition to the experts from leading companies like Google and Microsoft, and a keynote address from Bob Ambrogi, we’re very excited to have Vanessa Fox, the creator of Google Webmaster Tools,  joining us as a presenter at the Avvocating Conference.

Vanessa Fox, called a “cyberspace visionary” by Seattle Business Monthly, is an expert in understanding customer acquisition from organic search. She shares her perspective on how this impacts marketing and user experience at ninebyblue.com and provides authoritative search-friendly design patterns for developers at janeandrobot.com. She’s also an entrepreneur-in-residence with Ignition Partners, Contributing Editor at Search Engine Land, and host of the weekly podcast Office Hours. She previously created Google’s Webmaster Central, which provides both tools and community to help website owners improve their sites to gain more customers from search and was instrumental in the sitemaps.org alliance of Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft Live Search. She was recently named one of Seattle’s 2008 top 25 innovators and entrepreneurs. Look for her book Marketing in the Age of Google in early 2010.

At the Avvocating Conference on January 22 from 2:00-3:00pm, Vanessa will address how attorneys can maximize their search acquisition and avoid common pitfalls. She will provide advanced insight on customer search, content strategy, duplicate content, linking, and free tools, including how to best use Google Webmaster Tools.

Sign up for the Avvocating Conference today!

As we wrap up 2009 with all sorts of “best of” lists, it’s worth reminding all of our lawyer readers to update their Avvo Profiles during the less-hectic holiday season (unless you are working on the Senate health care bill). This is for a couple of reasons:

First, per usual, we will be conducting our “end of the year” Avvo Rating updates. While we update individual Avvo Ratings throughout the year, we typically reserve the end of the year for our biggest global tweaks to our scoring algorithm. These changes are largely the result of feedback from our consumer- and lawyer-users throughout the year. We also find ways to refine our mathematical models to ensure the Avvo Rating is as accurate as possible.

Second, the biggest ratings changes due to “aging” in a lawyer’s Avvo Profile typically happen on January 1. As you may recall, the value of many elements of an Avvo Profile erodes over time, so a 20-year-old award, sanction, etc., is less interesting to the Avvo Rating algorithm than something that occurred, say, last year. If we don’t know the month of an element, the aging change occurs at the first of the year.

Net/net, some lawyers will see changes to their ratings; and the more robust and up-to-date a lawyer’s profile is the less chance that any of these factors will have a negative impact on their rating. We expect to push through all changes by the end of January 2010 (btw, that feels so odd to write . . . weren’t we panicking about Y2K just a couple of years ago?).

And, if this post doesn’t give you your daily dose of Avvo, I did a recent podcast with Adrian Dayton’s posse where I talk a lot about Avvo and its different ratings. You can listen to it here. Thank you to Adrian and all of the participants on the call – it was a lot of fun.

Thanks,

Mark

p.s. I used Cliff Tuttle’s Avvo Profile because, interestingly, when you Google “Avvo Profile” Cliff’s profile is the first result. We are doing something wrong (or Cliff is doing something very right) in ranking for this term.

This has been a banner year for Avvo Answers. We started the year at about 15,000 answered questions and are now have over 130,000 answered questions (another stat to put this growth in perspective: we have twice as many answered questions in family law than we did on the entire site last year). We’re getting new lawyers participating every week, and our early contributors continue to stay active.

The growth has been tremendous and we’re all pretty happy with how well the Answers product has resonated with both lawyers and clients. We’ve talked with lawyers that have been getting business through their answers. They’re very vocal when they get clients.

But, clients can be considered the silent majority. They don’t send out a tweet when they’re dealing with fairly private legal issues.

So, we recently sampled a group of questioners after they used the Avvo Answers product. The results are interesting (327 responses):

Did you receive a helpful answer to your question?

(Looks sort of like Pac-Man. I promise this wasn’t intentional.) For those that rather see their results in words (or, don’t have a magnifying glass): 83% said they received a helpful answer. Participating lawyers: please keep up the great work.

Important traits for answers

We asked them to rate 7 traits as very important, important, or not important. The rankings from most to least important:

1. Promptness of answers
2. Recieving more than one answer
3. Lawyer’s practice area
4. Lawyer’s Avvo rating
5. Lawyer’s years of experience
6. Lawyer’s location
7. Lawyer’s picture

Would they consider hiring a lawyer who provided an answer to their question?

• 21% selected “Yes”
• 47% selected “Maybe — it’s just one factor in deciding”
• 15% selected “No — I’m not happy with the answer provided” (note similarity to Pac-Man chart above)
• 17% selected “No — I don’t need to hire a lawyer”

If anything, this seems to debunk any theories that Avvo Answers is only for people looking for free legal advice. About 1 in 5 don’t need a lawyer, but nearly 7 of 10 might actually hire the lawyer that answered the questions.

Next steps

The numbers are pretty good, but there’s still room for improvement. We are going to try to make Avvo Answers even better in 2010, and I’ll be following up in the coming months with proposed changes to help us move the needle on client satisfaction. If you have ideas, please use the comment section below. Or, just drop me a line: sachin at avvo.com.

I am happy to announce that Bob Ambrogi will be keynoting next month’s Avvocating conference. Everyone at Avvo is very excited about this. As we discussed in our recent “Favorite Legal Blogs of 2009” post, Bob is one of the legal industry’s most insightful commentators. Bob’s speech will be entitled, “Empowerment Through Social Media” and will cover the following:

- How social media has developed for both lawyers and consumers
- Why social media is a good thing for lawyers, including empowering them to be better marketers and run their practice more efficiently
- Why social media is empowering for consumers as well, and why that is important for lawyers to understand

Bob’s speech looks like the perfect addition to an already great line-up of speakers from LinkedIn, Facebook, Google, Microsoft Bing, University of Washington, Avvo, etc. If you have not already signed-up, you can do it online by visiting our Avvocating page.

Here is Bob’s official bio for a little more flavor on his background:

Robert J. Ambrogi, Esq.
Rockport, Mass.

Bob has been writing and speaking about lawyers and the Internet for more than 15 years. He is author of two books, The Best (and Worst) Legal Sites on the Web, now in its second edition, and The Internet Guide for Massachusetts Lawyers. Since 1993, his syndicated column about the Internet has appeared in legal periodicals throughout the U.S., and Law Technology News has published his award-winning Web Watch column since 1999. He founded the first Internet newsletter for lawyers, legal.online, in 1994. He continues to track new and intriguing Web sites for legal professionals through his blog LawSites. He also writes the blog Media Law, and co-authors Law.com’s Legal Blog Watch. Since August 2005, he has co-hosted a weekly legal-affairs podcast, Lawyer2Lawyer, available through the Legal Talk Network or on iTunes.

A practicing lawyer and mediator, Bob also provides editorial, media and Web consulting to law firms and law-related companies. Formerly, he was with American Lawyer Media in New York, where he was editor-in-chief of the National Law Journal and editorial director of ALM’s Litigation Services Division, responsible for the division’s Web sites and other print and electronic publications. Earlier, as director of the ALM News Service, he founded a daily newswire reporting legal news and cases from all 50 U.S. states. Before joining ALM, Bob was with Boston-based Lawyers Weekly Publications, where he was founding editor of the national newspaper Lawyers USA and editor-in-chief of the company’s flagship newspaper, Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly. A 1980 graduate of Boston College Law School, he is a fellow of the College of Law Practice Management, a trustee of the Massachusetts Bar Foundation and an active member of the Massachusetts Bar Association.

I look forward to seeing all of you at Avvocating on January 21st and 22nd.

Mark

Earlier this month we introduced Stefan Weitz of Microsoft Bing, one of the presenters at our upcoming Avvocating Conference.  Another impressive speaker joining us for the two day event is Nate Bucholz, Senior Account Manager with Google Adwords.

Based in Google’s Seattle office, Nate currently manages a number of the company’s largest travel accounts, including Expedia, Inc.  In this capacity, he oversees account-level strategy and works with advertisers to profitably grow their business.  Prior to working at Google, Nate worked in Business Development in Ukraine for the United States Peace Corps. He also managed aspects of the launches of Windows XP, Windows ME, and Windows 2000 with PR agency Waggener Edstrom.  Nate holds an MBA from the Haas School of Business at U.C. Berkeley.

At the Avvocating Conference on January 22 from 10:00-11:00am, Nate will be speaking about advanced pay-per click marketing.  An effective tool for generating prospective clients, performance-based marketing must be carefully and mathematically implemented to maximize return on investment.  Nate will discuss effective strategies for PPC campaigns and uncover common mistakes attorneys make that increase costs without increasing the number of prospective clients.

Sign up for the Avvocating Conference today!

From burning down a church to a bikini-clad babe with machine gun, a best of 2009 series wouldn’t be complete without a list of lawyers who, shall we say, had some “lapses in judgment” over the past year.  Here’s who made our list:

Brian Schroeder

You’ve recently graduated from Harvard law.  You’ve got a lucrative job offer from a prestigious law firm in hand.  How do you celebrate? You get drunk and burn down a church, of course!  Schroeder’s night out of light-hearted, church-burning fun took a wrong turn when, as it turns out, the church he set ablaze contained the remains of 9/11 victims.  Schroeder says he does not remember anything about that night.  The law firm he was slated to work for, which had offices in the World Trade Center, has rescinded his job offer.

Orly Taitz

She is a lawyer, a dentist, a real estate broker, a black belt in Taekwondo, owns a chain of dental clinics, is a mother of three and speaks five languages…she’s also the leading figure in the “birther” movement, determined to prove that President Obama is not a natural born US citizen.  In addition to Obama’s place of birth, Orly has investigated a number of other issues concerning Obama.  Fair enough.  How do we really know President Obama is not a Kenyan-born, homosexual-murdering, car-vandalizing, Marxist Muslim? In any event,  Orly’s quest for truth went awry when she angered federal judge Clay Land, prompting him to call her court filing “breathtaking in its arrogance and border[ing] on delusional.”   Now Orly’s on the hook for a $20,000 fine.

Larry Wilder

Okay, this is kind of sad, and Larry Wilder isn’t in the same league as the other people listed here, but for reasons you can probably understand, this picture has taken on a life of its own.

Larry Wilder did all the right things in planning for his night out.  He didn’t drive.  He didn’t hurt anyone or vandalize anything.  And if you were expecting hookers or cocaine to appear somewhere in this story, then you’ll be sorely disappointed.  The man didn’t even enter his house and risk disturbing his family when he arrived home late at night.  Instead, he waited outside and sobered up.  His only mistake was seeking shelter inside his neighbor’s garbage can.  Unfortunately for him, the neighbor called the police, and someone took pictures that spread all over the Internet.  Wilder soon after resigned from his job as City Attorney of Jeffersonville, Indiana.

Judges Mark A. Ciavarella Jr. and Michael T. Conahan

Some would call it a gross miscarriage of justice –- for-profit jailers paying $2.6 million in kickbacks to judges for sending undeserving juveniles to their facilities –- but the involved judges didn’t.  They called it THE GRAVY TRAIN.  Since 2002, Ciavarella and Conahan sent over 5,000 kids off to the juvenile detention centers to keep their pockets lined.

Peter Cammarano

A rabbi, a crooked politician, black market Gucci bags, organized crime, drugs, and money laundering.  No, it’s not Quentin Tarantino’s next movie, it’s New Jersey, and Peter Cammarano, mayor of Hoboken, was caught right in the middle of it.  Cammarano was accused of taking $25,000 in bribes from an informant working for the FBI.  Naturally, Cammarano has denied all the charges and looks forward to clearing his name.

Kumari Fulbright

This doesn’t really involve a lawyer, but it does involve a law student, machine guns, beauty pageants and kidnapping, so it deserves a spot here.  Kumari Fulbright, a law student at the University of Arizona, is a former beauty queen and also modeled for a little place called subguns.com, where women in bikinis wield machine guns.  Apparently the bikini-gun gigs weren’t paying well enough, because Kumari decided to do diversify her income with a little kidnapping for profit.  After holding her ex boyfriend at gun point for more than 10 hours, he escaped and she went to prison.  Do you think she’ll get past the character and fitness committee?

Marc Dreier

Marc Dreier would have been a run of the mill $700,000,000 ponzi scheme operator, except that Dreier and accomplices began impersonating other people to keep it going, adding a stranger than fiction twist to his story.   In one amazing stunt, Dreier hired someone to impersonate a big shot real estate developer, snuck into that real estate developer’s actual office, commandeered a conference room, and held a meeting between the fake developer and hedge fund investors.  In an interview recounting the event, Dreier says he wasn’t even nervous.

Dreier was finally caught in Toronto, where he was posing as a pension fund lawyer, trying to convince another hedge fund to lend him money. It’s shame Dreier went into law instead of the CIA — he would have made the best spy, ever.

I get a number of legal “alerts” from different firms, and this recent one from Perkins Coie caught my eye. It’s title, “New Facebook Promotions Guidelines Now in Effect” is simple enough; but, when you read it, it summarizes Facebook’s new guidelines with the respect and diligence typically reserved for federal rulemaking.

This is simply another testament to how central to commerce Facebook and other Web 2.0 companies (LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube, etc.) have become over the last couple of years. A blue-chip law firm like Perkins Coie (who is Avvo’s counsel btw) understands that Facebook’s rules impact their clients’ businesses – and they smartly want to be the first to alert their clients just as they would with an important change in federal regulation. I look forward to the day when Perkins is reporting on Avvo policy changes. :-)

Not surprisingly, this reminds me that Facebook will be speaking at our Avvocating Conference next month. It gives you the chance to speak to the giants of the Web face-to-face. It is going to be great.

Be Web-savvy.

Mark

Avvo Advertising is backed by a money-back Satisfaction Guarantee. Track the performance of your biggest ad on Avvo – not happy with its performance? Let us know within 90 days and we’ll refund your money. As far as I know, Avvo is the only company serving the legal industry to offer this level of commitment to our advertisers. The obvious conclusion is that we implemented a Satisfaction Guarantee in order to increase the close ratio of our sales pitches. While the Satisfaction Guarantee does help in driving revenue, its real purpose lies elsewhere.

I went to college in Maine, home of LL Bean with their famous outdoor clothing and gear supported by a 100% lifetime guarantee. Have a bag from 1967 with a zipper that gets stuck? Beans will replace it. A cracked fly rod? Beans will replace it. While this helps drive retail sales at LL Bean, the real purpose is in generating a maniacal internal commitment to designing and building the best hunting boots, down jackets and canoes and deliver those products at a reasonable price. Any shortcoming in quality hits the company directly in the pocketbook. The satisfaction guarantee has been in place since Leon Leonwood Bean sold his first pair of hunting boots in 1912. This ethos is the driving force behind the legions of extremely loyal LL Bean customers.

Which brings me back Avvo’s Satisfaction Guarantee. The real purpose for Avvo’s policy is that it pushes us to deliver and demonstrate tremendous value to our customers. Avvo can’t just be good (or even great). We have to be better than any other alternative on the market, or our customers will take their business elsewhere. That provides a very strong focus on delivering real value that extends across the entire organization. One of the things we had to do was demonstrate the value we were delivering. While it’s easy to see that the fleece vest I bought in 1994 still works, it’s harder for an attorney to see direct value from advertising dollars. So we rolled the most detailed comprehensive reporting system every seen by the legal industry into our Avvo Pro product and made it free for all of our advertisers.

The Satisfaction Guarantee isn’t a no-questions asked policy. We’ll absolutely refund your money, but expect a conversation as to why. If you want to leave, we’ll fight to keep your order and want to know what it will take to do so. The few of these conversations we’ve had, have lead to changes to the site, our pricing model and even the development of new products.

Isn’t it open to abuse? Sure there are people who take advantage of these types of guarantees. Certainly Beans gets customers who wear shoes 3 times and return them for a full refund just because they can. But Beans considers this a price of generating a quality product. We’ve had isolated incidents of being taken for a ride . . . but it’s worth it. Because everyone at Avvo knows that our revenue is dependent on our ability to deliver more value than anyone else in the market. And like LL Bean – this is a long term strategy that will build customers for life.