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.

The advent of advertising on Avvo has brought up a lot of internal discussion around product goals and how they relate to revenue.  I like to think about product and revenue as a walk in the mountains.  Elevation is revenue (higher = better) and each step you take is a product change.  If you want more revenue, walk up hill.  Sound familiar?

Large companies out there… let me know if this rings a bell:

Say you run the product team for a site (retailer, directory, whatever).  You ship an initial version.  Early on you probably go through two or three major site design overhauls (could be to increase revenue or just for usability).  As your traffic and revenue scale so does your organization.  You adopt an even greater focus on conversion.  Each change that is made is A|B tested.  Poor performers are immediately backed out.  With increased revenue comes increased risk of failure – the penalty for making a mistake is much larger.  With increased penalty for failure comes increased fear to change.  You are still walking up the mountain, but you’re taking very small steps.  Eventually you reach a point where you’ve invested so much time and money iterating on a single site design and business model that you can no longer improve it.  The design has run it’s course and you’ve reach the local maximum of site performance – the top of the mountain, the summit.  Good for you.  The problem is, you don’t know if there’s a taller mountain out there and the only way to find out is to walk down hill, which no one is willing to do.  You can, of course, use your position at the top of a tall mountain to shoot at people trying to climb up your mountain or other nearby mountains, but expedition-wise, you’re kind of stuck.

This seems to happen to all the biggies.  EBay, Amazon, Expedia (sorry guys).  Their core products are more or less exactly the same as they were 6-8 years ago.  Is this because they’ve all managed to find the absolute best of all possible site designs for their respective verticals (ie: the top of Mt. Everest)?  Or is it because they’ve climbed to a point where they can’t really climb any higher without first going down hill?  Their core product can’t be improved without first being rebuilt.  They can of course grow horizontally, but they will forever be defending their hill and they will always have more to lose than the people trying to push them off.

Is this avoidable?  What’s the lesson?  Can a growing company avoid this trap?  Can an established 800 pound gorilla get themselves out of it?  Beats me.  All I know is that once a hill climb algorithm reaches a local maximum, it has a choice: it can give up and declare a solution, or it can move to a random spot and start climbing again.

You can take that to mean one of two things:

1) As an employee of a company at the summit of a mountain, you can quit and join a startup which has just started climbing.
2) As the CEO of a company stuck at a summit, you can build your own competition.  Invest in a team that tries to knock the legacy site off its pedestal.  If that sounds too risky, don’t worry too much, sooner or later someone else will do it for you.

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…

A recent law.com article highlights the fact that attorney e-mail addresses are considered public records in Florida – and that a number of attorneys in the Sunshine State are suggesting that public access to these records be limited. As Florida lawyer Stephen Teppler puts it:

“The question becomes ‘what’s a public record?’ A database compilation is not a public record, at least not a public record that is contemplated by the statute. . . What would happen to this data if it weren’t on a computer? You would have 85,000 records. It would be of limited use to a purchaser.”

Um, actually, Stephen, that’s EXACTLY what’s contemplated by the statute (“An agency must provide a copy of the record in the medium requested if the agency maintains the record in that medium.” Fla. Stat. § 119.083(5)).

Advocating that the state purposely make its public records more difficult to access is totally out of line. State governments across the country have an embarrassing record of making public records inaccessible. Foot-dragging, non-responsiveness and the kind of shenanigans suggested by Mr. Teppler are precisely the reason every state has enacted expansive open records requirements.

At the federal level, the backsliding on open access during the Bush administration is what prompted one of President Obama’s first official acts – a memo to the administration essentially requiring agencies to look for reasons to comply with records requests, rather than technical reasons to hold public information back.

Here at Avvo, we’ve made no secret of our fights with recalcitrant states over attorney licensing data. Unfortunately, we still see state courts deploying Bush-league tactics in an effort to avoid transparency of attorney licensing and disciplinary records. Florida is a model for how states should make this information accessible. While attorneys can question whether email addresses are properly part of the public record (although I see no reason why they shouldn’t be), any efforts to place barriers in the way of access to public records should be strongly and loudly resisted.

We occasionally run across questions & answers that we think have universal interest and broad application. With no further ado, here is a recent question submitted by an individual located in Huntsville, Texas:

Sex In A Dressing Room: Is it legal? In a store such as JCpennies, Macy’s, or something like that? And what about public restrooms?

Thanks to Tony, Karen, Hoa and Nick – we are back – bigger and badder than ever. Next step is to have Google recognize that we are virus free. You may still see the message, “this site may harm your computer”, because it may take Google a bit of time to complete their review of our site.

Just a note to let our readers know that we are aware of “this site may be harmful” Google message. We are working on ridding the site of the virus. Stay tuned . . .

Another great day for Avvo: Today we launched “About Me,” a new tab on the Avvo Profile that allows lawyers to add pictures, video and just about anything else that suits their fancy.

Why the new tab? A number of lawyers told us that their personal story, which is often relevant to their practice, is not sufficiently told by the Avvo Profile’s structured fields. Trying to remedy this was tough because everyone’s personal story is different. So we decided to abondon structure and make “About Me” a free-form forum. Whether you want to promote your zest for rock-climbing, speak to your involvement in your church, or profess your love for the duckbilled platypus, “About Me” is for you.

Another request from the lawyer community has been an Avvo page for photos and videos. Many lawyers have impressive advertisements or videos relating to big cases they want to share. Others want to show photos of their offices, staff, families, cats and so on. Well, my fellow lawyers, pine no more — you can add an unlimited number of photos and videos to your “About Me” tab, and you don’t even need to upload them to the Avvo server. You can link to your videos on YouTube or anyplace else, and for photos you have the option of uploading or linking to them. It is almost too easy.

So, lawyers, be free . . . upload as much content as you like to your “About Me” tab as often as you like. Tell us (and your prospective clients) what really makes you tick. And, if you have suggestions on how to improve “About Me,” please let us know. As with all things Avvo, we will forever continue to refine this feature.

I am reminded of the old joke, “Enough about me, what do YOU think about me.”

Mark

On Friday I had the chance to give feedback to another start-up here in town regarding a new feature they are getting ready to launch. They contacted me because I have used their site in the past, and they wanted my input as someone familiar with the site’s current features. In start-up land we call this usability testing.

They sat me down in front of a computer that was recording my actions so they could analyze them later. Then a moderator walked me through a few scenarios and watched my reaction. The coolest thing about usability testing is that the user is never wrong. If I couldn’t find a link or had trouble navigating the page, it was a challenge the designers and developers had to manage, not something I was doing wrong. We do testing like this at Avvo and gain a lot of valuable information about how folks not only use Avvo, but also the Internet at large.

It reminded me that no start-up would be around if it weren’t for the feedback from our users; folks letting us know that they’d like to see a certain feature improved upon, or simply suggesting an idea we ourselves hadn’t thought of before (yes, it happens!). Feedback comes to us in informal emails to customercare@avvo.com, focus groups, usability testing and good old fashioned phone calls. We are always looking for anyone interested in giving us feedback. If you think you’d like to participate in a usability study, or simply want to share your opinion with us, email me at customercare@avvo.com.

Here at Avvo, we often talk about the benefits of user-generated content (“UGC”) i.e., how there is tremendous wisdom in the masses. Here is an interesting CNN article on UGC potentially run amok on a website called JuicyCampus. According to the article:

JuicyCampus’ endless threads of anonymous innuendo have been a popular Web destination on the seven college campuses where the site launched last fall, including Duke, UCLA and Loyola Marymount. It recently expanded to 50 more, and many of the postings show they’ve been viewed hundreds and even thousands of times.

But JuicyCampus has proved so poisonous there are signs of a backlash.

In campus debates over Internet freedom, students normally take the side of openness and access. This time, however, student leaders, newspaper editorials and posters on the site are fighting back — with some even asking administrators to ban JuicyCampus. It’s a kind of plea to save the students, or at least their reputations, from themselves.

Ultimately, it is only for the consumers of sites like JuicyCampus to determine whether the site is valuable. However, my bet is that sites that do not have at least some bar for the quality of their UGC will collapse under their own weight. Only time will tell, but that is why at Avvo we have published guidelines for client reviews and make sure that a human reviews every client review before it is posted. Also, if an attorney disputes a review, we will moderate the dispute to ensure that the client stands by his/her review. Such quality control is expensive, but we think it is worth it for the long-term health of the Avvo marketplace.

Mark