December 18th, 2009 by Sachin Bhatia, Product Manager

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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.

This entry was posted on Friday, December 18th, 2009 at 10:13 am by Sachin Bhatia, Product Manager and is filed under User Experience. 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.