One of the hazards of launching in new states is that we have to return, once again, to the bottom of the learning curve. I recently saw a Florida news article reporting that Avvo has Abraham Lincoln and other dead lawyers in its database. And, once again, the implication of the latest Uncle Abe sighting was that the Avvo system is somehow flawed.

I officially have dead lawyer fatigue. Not enough to remove dead lawyers from the Avvo database, mind you; but rather, just enough to take the time to offer these four simple facts in an attempt to rejuvenate myself:

Fact #1:
Avvo has EVERY deceased lawyer in its database in the states we currently cover.

Fact #2:
Consumers will NOT see a dead lawyer in their search results or anywhere else on the site UNLESS they search for the dead lawyer by name.*

Fact #3:
Having dead lawyers in our system is NOT a flaw in our system.

Fact #4:
Having dead lawyers in our system is REALLY cool.

*Click here to see Avvo’s disclosure on the site in this regard. The disclosure is also on every dead lawyers profile page.

Oddly I feel better already; but allow me to offer some additional color around these facts:

Avvo is building one of the largest lawyer databases in the country. Our power is in the breadth and depth of our database, including the fact that our database includes EVERY person that has ever been licensed as a lawyer in a given state, whether that person is dead or alive. That is cool.

Why is it cool? Because whatever your research assignment may be regarding licensed lawyers, you can find it on Avvo. Wondering whether your disbarred lawyer has been reinstated? Check Avvo. Wondering why your uncle stopped practicing law in 1975? Check Avvo. Wondering when Richard Nixon was licensed to practice law? Check Avvo.

At Avvo, it is not our mission to judge what information should be available to consumers. To the contrary, it is our mission to offer as much information and guidance to consumers as possible. Dead lawyers means a darn big database, and we at Avvo are very proud of it.

One closing note here: If a bar does not tell us someone is dead, there is really no way for us to know that the lawyer is truly dead. Sadly, a start-up budget does not contemplate a forensics team. Still, on occasion, we will get a call or email informing us that a dead attorney still has an Avvo Rating. Our general response is that they (or, even better, the lawyer’s family) should let the bar know so that the bar can update their records. Prudently, in my opinion, Avvo relies on the bars to tell us who is in fact dead or alive.

Hopefully this will lay to rest (every pun intended) any confusion about Avvo displaying dead lawyers.

Mark

Sometime in the summer of 2006, I got a mysterious message from one Ken Moscaret. He said, “Hey Mark, my name is Ken Moscaret. I am a lawyer, fee expert, and I am pretty sure I know what you guys are up to. I suspect it is a Zillow-like model for lawyers, where you bring a lot of information together regarding lawyers. I think it is a great idea and I would like to chat with you about some of my own.”

While I may not recall the message exactly, I do recall that it made me smile because (a) we were still in stealth mode, and (b) this guy certainly knew what he was talking about. So, I looked him up on the Internet and found this blurb:

Ken Moscaret, Esq., is a leading expert witness on attorney’s fees and litigation management, whose clients include big corporations, public entities, and Top 250 U.S. law firms. Mr. Moscaret testified as an expert witness in federal court in 2008 regarding $700 million in attorney’s fees in the Enron securities class action litigation in Houston.

Impressive. I decided to give him a call.

After becoming painfully acquainted with each other’s voicemail, Ken and I finally shared a long phone call where Ken offered a number of interesting ideas regarding new business models in the legal industry and where we might take Avvo. We continued to keep in touch over the next year and a half, with Ken consistently offering interesting ideas about opportunities in the legal marketplace.

Well, one of those ideas is now reality in form of a new blog penned by Ken called myLawCoach. Flatteringly, Ken talks about myLawCoach as a consumer-centric, informational resource that picks up where Avvo leaves off. In other words, once you have researched your issue and selected your lawyer, myLawCoach helps you manage your relationship with the lawyer. The site is set up as a number of question and answer, plain-English tutorials. Topics include things like attorney billing rules, costs of different phases of a case and explanations of different parts of the legal process.

Now, I tip my hat to any site with a sincere mission of helping consumers better understand the legal industry. However, Ken’s idea of holding their hand through the litigation process is truly unique. Yes, it will take Ken some time to build up enough guides to cover a broad swath of the almost-infinite number of issues that can arise in litigation, but he is off to a great start. Currently, many of the guides are cost focused – but, hey, that’s the guy’s greatest area of expertise, and geez I found cost issues to be perplexing even as a General Counsel.

So, Ken, kudos to you and myLawCoach. Congratulations on launching this novel site, and I wish you luck on continuing to build it out.

Mark

p.s. Once you have read every one of Ken’s myLawCoach posts, check out his eloquent prose in this article published in the Daily Journal this week. While I would have written this post even without this article, it only reinforces for me how much Ken and I see eye to eye.

Just a quick note to let everyone know that Avvo has expanded into the mighty states of Florida and Massachusetts. Here is the press release.

I have been eagerly awaiting congratulatory phone calls from both Ted Kennedy and Jeb Bush (heck, they might even be on spring break together right now). Maybe they are waiting until they have a little more time to chat after dinner.

In their absence, I want to thank Bob Ambrogi and Kevin O’Keefe for their supportive posts regarding Avvo and our launches. It means a lot to us to have these blogging heavyweights appreciate what we are doing.

MA and FL lawyers: As I said when we initially launched last June, please send us any suggestions you have regarding our site. One of the best ways for us to improve is by listening to you - the lawyers who use the site everyday. Good, bad or neutral, our suggestion box is wide open. You talk – we listen. That has been our promise from day one. My email is mb@avvo.com.

Bringing red and blue states together . . .

Mark Britton
CEO, Avvo

It has to be a subsection of Murphy’s law that Avvo’s biggest state controversy to date is resolved when our general counsel (who has been driving the whole thing) is on vacation. Josh, I hope you are enjoying the beach while I field your press calls.

Anyway, the big news is that New Jersey has graciously turned over to us the attorney records that we have been seeking for some time. There is not much to say here other than “thank you” to the New Jersey Supreme Court. As it turns out, as I hoped for here, we truly are of like mind in helping consumers get the information and guidance they need to choose the right lawyer.

Notwithstanding the resolution of this matter, you will see that I still posted Josh’s latest installment. It would be wrong for all of our readers to miss the middle part of our New Jersey odyssey. Also, here is the AP’s coverage of the story.

Onward!

Mark

Attorney Fred Korkosz of Albany, New York, offered some interesting comments yesterday to my post entitled, “Defending Avvo’s Right to Provide Information and Guidance to Consumers.” The problem is that my post is 9 months old and Fred’s comments were buried under 56 others. So, I wanted to republish Fred’s thoughts here, both to give them a better forum and to publicly thank Frank for his support.

I am an attorney who actually received a fairly high rating from AVVO. I think some points need to be considered.

1. Public disciplinary records of attorneys are just that; public. The fact that AVVO has data mined this information and organized it in an easy-to-access manner should offend no one. It simply makes it easier for potential clients to do the research that they should do but otherwise might not. Not all disciplinary actions necessarily reflect on how attorneys will represent their clients; but the information should be available and considred by potential clients.

2. Since the amount of control that may be exercised by attorneys over their listings is limited, the concerns about advertising are somewhat less compelling than they would be if attorneys could anonymously make postings that boost their ratings.

3. It is true that no ratings systems is a perfect way to evaluate how an attorney will perform. However the existing ratings systems (i.e. Martindale-Hubbel, which has provided AV ratings for a few years) are not necessarily any better than AVVOs system; although the MH system does not really provide for the negative information that AVVO does, it is also voluntary on the attorneys’ part to participate. I do not know how some of the “best attorneys” publications operate, in particular, whether or not they are revenue based. It appears that AVVO is seeking to base some of its ratings on public performance records. That, of course can be difficult; some attorneys, for example, assigned criminal defense attorneys and some immigration attorneys may only appear in reported cases that were hopeless to begin with; if they were sucsessful, the case may never have made it up to the level where a decision was reported. I can certainly appreciate the sentiments of attorneys who may be in that situation, but I believe that the AVVO system is better than boards that allow anonymous postings about attorneys as the only indication of performance; those can be skewed by attorneys themselves building themselves up, a few disgruntled and irrational clients (who typically would be the most inclined to make posts!), and possibly even competitors.

-Fred Korkosz

Well said. Thanks again Fred!

Mark

Always being up for a good chuckle, I had to share what has to be the quote of the month.

I was just chatting with a friend who is a partner in a large law firm. On a merger deal this summer (he was representing the buyer), a partner from Skadden angrily told him that he was a “pathetic little mouthpiece doing the work of the devil.”

Beautiful.

Only in heated transactions (or everyday litigation) does such poetry arise. If anyone has any similarly eloquent, lawyer-generated prose, please send it along.

Mark

Here at Avvo, we have been getting a fair number of inquiries regarding the AP story that broke yesterday reporting our difficulties in getting lawyer records from New Jersey. For those that are interested, our General Counsel, Josh King, is putting together a diary of sorts regarding our dealings with New Jersey to date. The first installment is ready to go and, although based in reality, the story is just outlandish enough to make for good reading. Josh’s plan is to keep releasing installments until we reach some level of rational interaction with New Jersey.

As a preamble to all of this, I want to say that we are not trying to poke a stick in New Jersey’s regulatory eye. That being said, we are completely baffled regarding New Jersey’s behavior to date. The information we are requesting is already published in book and disc form (costing you $78 + tax and shipping by the way) by a company called Lawyers Diary, based in New Jersey. If this information is so confidential or otherwise difficult to produce, then why does New Jersey only distribute it through the very expensive Lawyers Diary year after year? Wouldn’t New Jersey want to make that information widely available for consumers for free? Yes, one can call the New Jersey clerk of court and get any information regarding a single attorney; but that’s not very helpful if, like all of those going to the Yellow Pages, you don’t have any attorney’s name.

We look forward to New Jersey addressing some of these inconsistencies, and I personally look forward to Josh’s reporting on it all. In the end, if New Jersey and Avvo are truly of like mind in helping consumers get the information and guidance they need to choose the right lawyer, then this should all take care of itself pretty quickly.

Josh, take it away . . .

Mark

I guess we could call this a special edition of “Lawyers in the News” because I’m not sure that any lawyer has seen this much press since maybe Nixon.

Anyway, from the title, you probably assume that I am going to get on my high horse and pummel Mr. Spitzer for the inconsistent activities of his alter ego “George Fox.” (who interestingly was also the founder of the Quaker movement). Sorry to disappoint, but how could I offer something so highbrow when there is a MUCH bigger ratings story in all of this? In fact, I’m a little disappointed that it has not been the heart of the Spitzer story.

Allow me to elaborate: According the Wall Street Journal, Eliot’s (or George’s or Client 9’s) current favorite website, Emperorsclub.com, guided its customers using a rating system of one to seven diamonds, with the seven diamond ladies charging roughly $5,500 per hour.

Now, Eliot only paid $4,300 so that probably puts him in the five to six diamond category – but I digress.

The POINT is that, from Eliot’s actions, we can only presume that he was attracted to this elite service because of the exceptional information and guidance it offered regarding the “services” available through the site. I mean, if you are going to buy something that might destroy your entire political career, it’s a pretty important decision.

So, while he didn’t come out and say it, I see this as a fairly strong endorsement by Mr. Spitzer of ratings systems across the board. While we don’t see this as a great time to hire Eliot as an Avvo spokesperson, we appreciate his support nonetheless.

Keep up the great work, Eliot.

Mark

Here’s an interesting article from the ABA’s Law Practice Magazine on the new website Texas Bar Circle. It looks like Texas is getting into the lawyer social networking business similar to Ohio’s Liam which launched last year. While each of these sites might offer competition to Avvo, I am simply happy to see these state bars being progressive and helping their attorneys enhance their web presence. Also, the more acquainted attorneys get with the web, the more they will understand that AVVO RULES!

The digital tidal wave is only gaining force. Grab your long boards . . .

Mark

Oddly, I always find pro-Avvo articles to be incredibly well-written. Through that lens, here is an article that is INCREDIBLY well written. Entitled “Disrupting the Lawyer Ratings Paradigm,” the article is on Law.com and written by Joe Campos of Stanislaw Ashbaugh. Joe writes:

What makes Avvo a truly unique concept, however, is its ability to create a dynamic and interactive community of lawyers, clients and prospective clients. . . .

A collection of hardbound volumes cannot generate the sort of interactivity and real-world information about lawyers and law firms that is experienced, contributed and compiled on Avvo every day. Information about lawyers is being shared by those who have first-hand experience, resulting in a searchable database of information that is accessible to prospective clients around the country and the world. If information is power, then Avvo effectively shifts the balance of power away from lawyers and law firms to clients, prospective clients and every other user of its Web site.

As you may recall, I blogged about Stanislaw Ashbaugh being an innovative firm whose attorneys, without urging or compensation from Avvo, had all claimed their Avvo Profiles and put Avvo Badges on their website. Further enhancing his and his firm’s web presence, Joe Campos launched the blog DigitalMediaLawyer.com. Suffice it to say that these guys “get it,” and I am honored to have them waxing poetically regarding the “paradigm shift” we know as Avvo.

Also interesting is the amount of attention that Joe’s article has received. After Joe’s article hit the web, I received roughly 10 Google Alerts regarding other websites/blogs reporting or commenting on the article. One of them was Kevin O’Keefe, whose understanding of this space always impresses me. In his post entitled “Avvo to disrupt Martindale-Hubbell’s ratings system” he says:

The Avvo concept is here to stay. Consumers of legal services who can get online reviews on dishwashers are going to demand, through their behavior, that comments about lawyers be freely available. Whether comments come from other lawyers or clients, the information is just too valuable.

Martindale-Hubbell has been suppressing this concept for years. They want a monopoly on lawyer ratings. Money to made there. Plus when you’re charging law firms 10’s and 100’s of thousands of dollars to display their lawyers in a directory, you don’t want law firm customers walking when they don’t like what another lawyer or consumer has said.

Bloggers Carolyn Elefant and Scott Greenfield* also offered interesting posts, although Scott’s commentary sometimes leaves me scratching my head. For instance, in his latest post he criticizes lawyers for participating in Avvo Answers and Track Record. Soon he will be railing against pro bono work and rescuing homeless kittens.

Finally, the attention that Joe’s article received reminded me of how unpredictable the community voice can be. In January, the ABA Law Practice Management Section published this pro-Avvo article and no one even batted an eye. Then Joe’s article comes out and I thought my Google Alerts were malfunctioning. There is an interesting social study in all of this, or maybe Joe’s article *was* just that well written.

Mark

* Per Scott’s latest blog post, I would just like to let him know that, while I have yet to post to his blog, I love him and think of him most every day. One day I will write, but in the meantime I am swamped with trying to corrupt the legal profession by getting consumers answers to their legal questions.