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There have been more than 1 million views of lawyer profiles on Avvo since we launched less than a year ago. And while Avvo is free to every lawyer, some attorneys have figured out how to set themselves apart from the rest and the payoff is more clients. True to our promise of treating every lawyer equally, we'd like to share these best practices with anyone who wants to optimize their presence on Avvo. On April 29th we'll be hosting a free online webinar (an online presentation combined with an audio conference). Mark and I will host, and it will be a very practical look at how to make the most of your presence on Avvo. We'll also share some of the research we've done with consumers to help you understand what they are looking for when searching for a lawyer. You'll also have an opportunity to ask me and Mark questions. Some of the topics we'll cover include:

-What factors influence a consumer's decision to hire a lawyer
-What does (and doesn't) influence the Avvo Rating
-How to optimize your Avvo Profile for search engines
-How your profile can help you connect on a personal level with potential clients
-How to demonstrate your expertise in specific areas of the law
-How to be the first attorney to interact with a potential client
-A look at recently released features such as “My Profile” and “About Me”
-An update on soon-to-be-released features

The webinar is free and will take place on Tuesday, April 29th from 12pm to 1pm Pacific time.

To register, simply click here.

A couple of weeks ago Amanda’s blog post mentioned Lawyerpalooza, a battle-of-the-bands event that takes place each year here in Seattle to raise money for music programs at local schools. We loved the idea of lawyers duking it out on stage rather than in the courtroom, and raising money for a good cause in the process. So I picked up the phone to chat with the organizer, Mike Nesteroff, an attorney at Lane Powell and part-time musician, and Avvo is now a sponsor – actually, we’re officially the “food” sponsor — of Lawyerpalooza 2008. This is the first legal event we’ve sponsored, and while not a traditional event like a CLE or conference, it seems like a fitting place to start for Avvo.

It should be a fun event that raises money for a great cause, so if you live in Seattle try to come down to the Showbox (by Pike Place Market) on Thursday, April 24th. The doors open at 5:30pm, and tickets are $20, which you can buy online at the Lawyerpalooza website or in person at the Showbox.

Hope to see you there.

Paul

Lawyers visiting Avvo over the past couple of weeks probably noticed a change when they arrived. We recently released a new feature, My Profile, to make it easier for lawyers to manage their Avvo Profile and keep it up to date. Essentially, My Profile is a summary of your participation on Avvo. It provides a snapshot of your ratings (Avvo Rating, client ratings, and peer endorsements), indicates what % of your profile has been filled out, suggests what you can do to make your profile more complete, and identifies questions on Avvo Answers that are relevant to your practice areas.

A new element, which we will build out over time, shows a running list of changes you have made to your profile, as well as changes that others in your network (i.e. those you have endorsed, or been endorsed by) have made to their profiles.

As always, we love to get your feedback, so please let us know what you think after you try it out.

The Economist has a good article “The battle for Wikipedia’s soul” that explores the rift opening up between two Wikipedia factions. The factions are the “inclusionists”, who essentially believe that Wikipedia should include information on any and every topic that an individual is willing to invest the time to write about, and the “deletionists”, who argue that Wikipedia should adhere to strict criteria regarding which subjects are worthy of being on the the site. The battle seems to be getting bloody, as one faction has come to calling the other faction “wiki-lawyers.”

The behavior of Wikipedia’s self-appointed deletionist guardians, who excise anything that does not meet their standards, justifying their actions with a blizzard of acronyms, is now known as “wiki-lawyering”

Notwithstanding the not-so-flattering allusion to the legal profession, this ideological split is yet another sign that user-generated content (UGC) is coming of age. Google, with its planned “knol” service, seems to be on the side of the inclusionists, betting that the community of consumers can be effective at arbitrating what content is useful, particularly if articles include information on the writer’s credentials.

We’ve had similar discussions inside Avvo, particularly as it pertains to expanding the content on our site and to what degree the content should be “editorial” vs. “user-generated”, or a mix of both. While UGC has the advantage of tapping into the unique expertise of a broad population of individuals, there is the potential for UGC spam that does not exist with a purely editorial model. When we did the initial planning for Avvo, we felt that the best approach would be a combination of the two. Thus, the Avvo Rating essentially gives an editorial “opinion”, and this is enahnced with UGC from both lawyers and consumers.

In any case, I was pleased to see that Wikipedia’s entry on deletionism and inclusionism has survived the wrath of the deletionists on Wikipedia itself.

When we launched Avvo last June, I think it’s fair to say that we were greeted with a mixed reaction from the legal community. Even some solo practitioners — for whom Avvo’s free online profiles seemed a perfect fit – took issue with the new approach we were bringing to the industry.

How things change in just a few short months.

Today we are proud to announce that Davis Wright Tremaine, one of the top law firms in Seattle, has claimed the Avvo Profiles of all 225 lawyers in their Seattle and Bellevue offices. As much as this is an endorsement of Avvo, I think it also signals a recognition within the legal industry that the Internet is changing the way firms must conduct their business. A listing in Martindale Hubbell or the Yellow Pages just won’t cut it anymore – even for large law firms that rely largely on referrals for new clients.

Davis Wright Tremaine claimed their profiles using our Firm Claim feature, which makes it easy for an individual within a firm to claim – and if they choose to, maintain — the Avvo Profiles for every lawyer in the firm. While Davis Wright Tremaine is the largest firm to date to utilize Firm Claim, 17 firms have done so to date and more are in process (see a partial list below).

For more information on Firm Claim, check our the Firm Claim page or email us at customercare@avvo.com

Finally, many thanks to the forward-looking attorneys at Davis Wright Tremaine, and to Mark Usellis, their Director of Marketing and Business Development, for demonstrating their support of Avvo and consumers.

Partial List of Firms Utilizing Firm Claim
Davis Wright Tremaine
Ryan, Swanson & Cleveland
Stanislaw Ashbaugh
Savitt & Bruce
Wallin & Klarich
TroyGould
Wisselman, Harounian & Associates
Ziff, Weiermiller, Hayden & Mustico
HoganWillig
Amer Cunningham
Adduci, Mastriani, & Schaumberg
Lipman & Wolf

In his blog today, Bob Ambrogi writes about several new services – public.resource.org, altlaw, and preCYdent – that give lawyers and consumers access to public records — specifically federal (and eventually state) case law. It’s great to see content in the public domain being made more accessible to consumers, because our experience at Avvo doing so has certainly been an interesting one.

We rely on public records from the state bars to populate certain elements of lawyer profiles on Avvo.com. For example, this is where we get lawyer’s licensing information and disciplinary sanction records. Accessing this information, however, has been an eye-opening experience.

What I’ve learned is that the term “public” record is very much open to interpretation and in fact varies widely from state bar to state bar. Some states make this information easily and freely available to the public. The Washington State Bar is a great example of this. Others are a bit more difficult – sometimes because they don’t have the systems in place to make the information accessible. There are some states, however, to which the term “public” seems to mean anything but – they put up barrier after barrier to making this information accessible. It’s somewhat perplexing, because Avvo’s mission is very much aligned with that of the state bars: making the legal system accessible to everyone.

We will continue to do everything we can to make public information truly accessible to the public, even if we have to jump through hoops to do it. Kudos to these web sites for doing the same.

Last week Mark blogged that every lawyer at Seattle-based Stanislaw Ashbaugh had claimed their Avvo Profiles and put the Avvo Badge on the profile pages of the Stanislaw Ashbaugh web site. Last Friday they went a step further, taking out an advertisement in the Puget Sound Business Journal. Under the headline “Results Speak Louder Than Words”, the ad shows the bio pages of four Stanislaw Ashbaugh attorneys (Joe Campos, Richard Skalbania, David Ashbaugh, and Robert Marconi), with the Avvo Badge displayed on each.

As the marketing guy at Avvo, I wish I could take some credit for coming up with this idea, but the credit belongs entirely to Stanislaw Ashbaugh partner Joe Campos and Chief Results Officer Annie Lombroia. In fact, there is no marketing arrangement between Avvo and Stanislaw Ashbaugh, and Avvo didn’t contribute to the creation or publication of the ad (nor did Stanislaw Ashbaugh ask us to do so).

Every day we hear stories of law firms using Avvo to build their presence on the Internet and attract new clients. It’s great to see the folks at Stanislaw Ashbaugh not only embrace Avvo as a tool to help build their practice, but to so proudly promote it to their peers and clients.

Mark will be on Legal Line this Sunday with Bob Pittman at 9:00 am. Mark and Bob will be joined by Sharon Chiricillo who will be discussing DUI matters. Tune your radios to AM 770!

In October, Mark was recognized as one of Seattle’s Top 25 Innovators by Seattle Business Monthly magazine. While we didn’t blog about it then, yesterday’s dismissal of the lawsuit against us reminds me that innovators sometimes take arrows when they break new ground. Love us or sue us, it’s gratfiying that the courts do not condone those who try to impede innovation.

As I write there is an unusual amount of commotion in the Avvo offices. We’ve moved from our home of the past 18 months, in Seattle’s historic Pioneer Square, to new and larger digs in the heart of downtown.

Why did we move? Quite simply, we needed more space. While we’ve always been pretty conservative with space (Mark and I have shared an office since we started the company), last month we were forced for the first time to put an employee’s desk in a hallway rather than an office. Our new space, while not having quite the same character as our offices in Pioneer Square (where previous tenants included Internet companies Redfin and Real Networks), gives us alot more room to spread out and to grow. And being just a block from Macy’s and Nordstrom, it should help with the holiday shopping.

Even though we had a freak snowstorm during the move this weekend everything went smoothly. Except there seems to be no heat. But, as always, our team has adapted, as you can see from Sachin’s winter wardrobe.

Our new address is:
217 Pine Street, Suite 300
Seattle, WA 98101