Avvo today announced the addition of the Avvo Legal Advisory (ALA) and Avvo Health Advisory (AHA) to its community of more than 125,000 professionals. Avvo intends to publish one ALA and one AHA every month that will feature data from surveys of Avvo’s broad user base and community of licensed professionals, as well as analysis of questions asked in Avvo’s Q&A forum.

Avvo’s first Avvo Legal Advisory (ALA), published today, highlights the correlation between lawyer reviews and prospective client inquiries.  Avvo data shows that bankruptcy, DUI and immigration clients are generally the happiest with their lawyers, and that among our users, more than 87 percent of lawyer reviews are positive and over 89 percent say they would recommend their attorney to others. Take a look at the press release for the full report.

Avvo’s first Avvo Health Advisory (AHA), published in March, identified consumer trends related to the use of alcohol and prescription drug consumption. In April, Avvo published an AHA on patient reviews which provided new data about consumer reviews of medical and dental professionals.

Tomorrow we kick off our third annual legal marketing conference – Avvocating 2012: Legal Marketing in the Era of Social Media! Lawyers and legal marketers from 23 different states and Canada will gather at the Bell Harbor Conference Center in downtown Seattle to learn the latest in online marketing, social media, business development and reputation management. If you’d like to join us, please do! There are still a few tickets left!

We’re also thrilled to have a great group of sponsors joining us at Avvocating. Special thanks to the following:

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Consumers come to Avvo seeking expert advice and guidance from the professionals in our community, and one of our top priorities here at Avvo is to make sure those people receive meaningful legal and medical answers to their questions in our Q&A forum.

One the legal side, because some laws vary from state to state, we’ve found that consumers often receive the most value from an answer written by a lawyer licensed in their state. We have also heard from a number of attorneys on Avvo that they care greatly about the accuracy of answers to questions regarding state-specific legal situations.

To address this, I am pleased to announce we have launched two new features on our answers page.

First, answers from lawyers licensed in the state in which the question is asked will now be designated with a “Licensed in ST” graphic at the top of the answer.

Second, the sort order of answers for a given question will be affected by this designation.  The answers from instate attorneys will display before those from other states, unless the Avvo community tells us the out of state answers are better than the instate ones.

Additionally, to underscore our professional community’s experience and knowledge, we are now splitting the “mark as good” feature into two segments.  Professionals can now “Agree” with another answer and consumers can mark an answer as “Helpful”.  We will highlight the number of these Agree and Helpful “votes” to consumers to help them identify which answers are most relevant and respected.

With these new features, we’ve made it even easier for consumers to quickly find the most meaningful answers to their questions.

As always, thanks for all you do to help our community, and keep up the great answers. We look forward to seeing you at Avvocating!

We’re excited to announce that LexBlog will provide extensive coverage of Avvocating 2012!

Led by Colin O’Keefe and his editorial team, LexBlog will provide preview discussions with some of the speakers leading up to the two-day conference, and then highlights and video interviews from the different sessions and legal marketing sponsors on the exhibitor floor.

Have you purchased your ticket to Avvocating yet? There’s still time to join us May 3rd-4th in Seattle!

Hear Mark Britton, Avvo CEO, explain why lawyers should attend this year:

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With only a couple weeks until the Avvocating Conference, between now and then we’re going to highlight the various speakers and their presentations. You can see from the agenda it’s an exciting mix of industry and technology leaders, as well as web-savvy practicing attorneys who will all share their insights and expertise on legal marketing and digital media.

This is the third Avvocating Conference, and will no doubt be the best one yet!

On Thursday, May 3rd Avvocating will kick off with a keynote presentation from Rich Barton, entitled: Power to the People: Transparency and the New Super-Empowered Consumer.

Rich is the Co-Founder and Executive Chairman of Zillow.  Rich served as CEO & Chairman from 2005 until September 2010 when he passed the CEO baton to Spencer Rascoff.  Before co-founding Zillow, Rich founded Expedia.com, the world’s largest travel agency.  Expedia was started within Microsoft in 1994, and then spun out in 1999 as a public company;  Rich served as President, CEO and Board Director until 2003.  Rich also co-founded and serves as Non-Executive Chairman of unique jobs site, Glassdoor.com and mobile discovery app, Trover, and he co-founded Intertainment gameshow, King of the Web.  Rich is also a venture partner at Benchmark Capital and on the boards of directors at Netflix, Nextdoor, Avvo, RealSelf.com and YearUp.org.

His industry knowledge and experience combined with a deep understanding of how consumers interact online and use the web to find services will provide an excellent start to the conference.

On Friday, May 4th Avvocating will conclude with a closing keynote presentation from Stephen Fairley, entitled: The Lifestyle Law Firm: Lead Generation, Lead Conversion, and Client Retention Strategies for Attorneys.

Wrapping up everything we’ve covered in the two-day conference, combined with Stephen’s experience working with lawyers and law firms to market their practices, this will be a session you don’t want to miss.

Stephen is a two-time international best-selling author and CEO of The Rainmaker Institute®, the nation’s largest law firm marketing company specializing in lead conversion for law firms. Over 8,000 attorneys have benefited from applying the proven Rainmaker Marketing System taught at The Rainmaker Institute. Stephen is a nationally recognized thought leader in the field of legal marketing and best practices of lead conversion for law firms. He has appeared in Inc and Entrepreneur magazines, has authored 10 books, taken 14 cruises, and traveled to 33 countries. He resides in Phoenix with his wife of 17 years.

Still thinking about attending? Don’t wait any longer because tickets are going fast! And use the code SAVE100 to get $100 off the regular price. Register now!

We’re thrilled to share that Avvo is a 2012 Webby Award Nominee!

What is a Webby Award, you ask? The Webby Awards are the Internet’s most respected symbol of success. This year alone the Academy received nearly 10,000 entries from all 50 US states and over 60 countries worldwide.

As a nominee for best health website, Avvo is now also eligible for The Webby People’s Voice Award, which is decided by votes from the online community.

This is where we need your help!

TO VOTE:
Go to http://pv.webbyawards.com/ballot/26, click on the Avvo logo and confirm your selection. You will then be asked to register/sign in and you can easily complete this step using your Facebook, Twitter or Google account. Voting is open between now and April 26, 2012. Cast your ballot now and help get the word out. You can tell others in your social networks after you vote!

Avvo is only as strong as its community, so we thank you as always, for your support!

ABA TECHSHOW wrapped up a couple weeks ago, but attendees are still buzzing about the people they met, things they learned and new technologies they tried.

This Thursday, April 12 at 1:00PM ET/10:00AM PT we are excited to welcome back Andrea Cannavina, CEO and founder of LegalTypist, Inc,  as a guest webinar host.

During this webinar Andrea will recap what she heard and saw over her three days at ABA TECHSHOW. Covering topics such as tablets, e-discovering, paperless offices, virtual lawyering, cloud computing and social media – there’s something for everyone to learn.

And there’s no one more suited to report back on one of this biggest legal technology shows of the year!

Andrea customizes each workflow to her client’s existing technology, equipment and comfort level. LegalTypist offers law firms of all sizes a scalable digital workflow accessible from any telephone or internet connection that is as easy on the staff to implement as it is on the firm budget. She understands what technology is important (and not so important) for solo and small firm lawyers and legal marketers.

We hope you can join us this Thursday to hear Andrea’s full report.

Sign up here!

Only 1 month until Avvocating 2012: Legal Marketing in the Era of Social Media!

If you haven’t checked out the agenda, don’t wait another minute!

Technology luminary Rich Barton, Co-Founder of Zillow and Founder of Expedia, and law firm marketing expert Stephen Fairley, Founder of the Rainmaker Institute will be giving keynote presentations.

Carolyn Elefant, well-known author and blogger at MyShingle.com; Matt Homann, Founder of LexThink; Vanessa Fox, Creator of Google Webmaster Tools, and many more industry leaders and web-savvy attorneys are speaking.

We’re also happy to offer you a discount for $100 off the regular ticket price. Use the code: SAVE100 when registering at www.avvocating.com. This offer is only valid for those who purchase a ticket between April 3, 2012 and April 10, 2012.

We look forward to seeing you in Seattle in May for what promises to be the best Avvocating yet!

Despite the fact that nearly 100,000 lawyers have claimed their Avvo profiles, thousands of lawyers pay to advertise on Avvo, and Avvo drives over 200,000 consumer inquiries to lawyers every month, there remain those who don’t appreciate what we’re doing. In some cases this is driven by a desire to control every aspect of the information available about one online. In other cases, displeasure that Avvo is shining a light on attorney discipline and poor client service – or shock that our system, which profiles nearly every lawyer in the country and provides a forum for client feedback – may not be, in every instance, perfect.

In any event, I consistently field demands – and threats of lawsuits – from these attorneys. And believe it or not, we take feedback and act on it. Whether it’s product suggestions or data errors, we will always dig in and make corrections and improvements wherever warranted. But what we won’t do is deviate from our mission of providing consumers with more guidance than they’ve ever had in navigating the often-opaque legal marketplace. We won’t delete attorney profiles, client reviews or Avvo Ratings just because an attorney is mad and threatens us with a lawsuit.

It’s sometimes perplexing to attorneys that their lawsuit threats are met with indifference on my part. But I have faith that most attorneys will get past their initial frustration and realize how Avvo can be valuable to their practices – or at least accept that Avvo is operating solidly within the law, and that filing a lawsuit would be futile.

And indeed, lawsuits against Avvo are exceedingly rare. John Henry Browne tried it when we first launched in 2007; his federal class action was promptly tossed on First Amendment grounds. Joseph Rakofsky sued Avvo (and me) over a blog post I wrote, but he also sued just about everyone, and his suit is so utterly without merit that it’s hardly worth mentioning. And finally, there’s Larry Joe Davis.

Davis, a sanctioned Florida lawyer, sued Avvo back in 2010 . Over what, it wasn’t entirely clear; he amended his complaint several times. But he was definitely upset that we had classified him as an employment lawyer rather than a health care lawyer (something he found out about because a potential client called him seeking employment law representation). It’s taken some time to wade through the amendments and get Davis’ case moved to the proper court here in Seattle, but I’m happy to report that, like Browne, Davis’ case has been unceremoniously dismissed.

In fact, it’s been more than dismissed. Since the Browne case in 2007, Washington has enacted an anti-SLAPP statute. This statute allows those who are sued over their constitutionally-protected activities to quickly dismiss meritless lawsuits. Upon such a dismissal, the plaintiff is responsible for the defendant’s legal fees and must pay a $10,000 fine. Davis’ lawsuit was dismissed on these grounds; we will be submitting our fee application in the weeks ahead. (Here’s the decision (pdf) in Davis v. Avvo.)

Anti-SLAPP statutes provide a powerful counterbalance to attempts to silence via threat of litigation. As this case shows, there can be real costs in trying to use the coercion-via-litigation tactic when you haven’t got an actionable claim. Of course, we’re lucky here in Washington that we’ve got such a powerful weapon in defense of free speech. A number of other states have similar laws, but what’s really needed is a national anti-SLAPP law. I’ll be writing more about this in the months to come, but check out the Public Participation Project (of which I’m a board member), which is spearheading the drive for just such a law.

San Francisco litigator Michael Hassan recently had one of his answers in Avvo highlighted on MSN Money.  The article was on church foreclosures (see the article here) and MSN writes:

“Another comfort: Church defaults can’t touch individual congregants “unless membership requires that you personally sign a document accepting responsibility for loans to the church,” writes San Francisco attorney Michael Hassen in response to a question at Avvo.com, an expert advice site.”

Awesome.

Congrats Michael on the publicity.  Thank you for participating in Avvo.  May Avvo continue to bring you much press and business!

Press amplification:  One of the many benefits of participating in Avvo’s Q&A forum.

Be Amplified!

Mark