I’m thiiinking of a number…Do you know your Avvo Score?

June 6, 2007 · Leave a Comment

Avvo’s here!

I was going to call this the “countdown to the Avvo launch,” but then they went and launched, so I guess there’s no point in counting anything down anymore.

Wot’s Avvo?

Well, Nigel: Avvo is the brainchild of Microsoft-Expedia alumni. Actually, it’s sort of a sister to Zillow (“Your Edge in Real Estate”), since both share access to the deep pockets of Rich Barton and some major VC (Benchmark Capital and Ignition Partners ). Here’s their media page.

It boasts a small, experienced team and a powerful board… in other words, it’s high tech and well-funded. They’ve certainly got the beat.

From the looks of it, it is designed to become a “default” type of advertising opportunity for lawyers, while serving up interesting tidbits about those same lawyers so that consumers can know more about attorneys before making the decision to hire them.

To learn more about the company background, your best resource is John Cook’s Venture Blog/Seattle PI out of Seattle. Here are some links to the relevant articles to get you started:

Test Search

Soooo, I threw in the names of a bunch of famous lawyers, just to see what would happen. Here’s what I found:

John Edwards	Presidential Candidate	Avvo Rating : N/A
Alberto R. Gonzales	Attorney General, current	Avvo Rating : N/A
Barack Obama	Presidential Candidate	Avvo Rating : N/A
Janet Reno	Attorney General, 1991-2003	Avvo Rating : N/A
Hillary Clinton	Presidential Candidate	Avvo Rating : N/A
Rudy Giuliani	Presidential Candidate	Avvo Rating : N/A
Theodore Wells	“Scooter” Libby’s lawyer	Avvo Rating : 2 different listings: 5.8 and 5.9
Anthony D. Romero	ACLU Executive Director	Avvo Rating : 6.3
Mychal Angelo Wilson	entertainment lawyer	Avvo Rating : N/A

Ok, I thought some of these guys would be there, but they weren’t, so this is truly still in beta. That’s ok. There’s plenty to play with here.

Web 2.0-ish ness

I can’t do this in one sitting, so bear with me.

On the face of it, the Ajax is certainly cool. But hey, I also like the Paolo Nutini ’s New shoes video! He reminds me of my favorite high school students. Tube is repetitive, but it’s good background noise.

Anyway, there’s a nice mash-up kinda thing going with the integration of Google Maps on the profiles. And, you can share profiles with friends by giving up your e-mail information.

Hmmm. That’s one thing that I rarely, if ever, have done: give third parties my contact information in order to “share” information on the web. I simply use my browser (Firefox, or in a pinch, IE ) to send the page by e-mail, or copy the link and send it as a text link. It would be interesting to see how that works. I suppose it’s to allow early adopters to spread the word, by sending unsuspecting lawyers a heads-up about their listings.

One thing I would flag that doesn’t quiiite make sense is not having a location tab. The two search tags have “legal practice area” and “name”, and location is under “name.” A tab for location would work and not take up too much space.

I think what happened is that there is just not enough legally relevant information on these guys, because they’re politicians more so than lawyers…except for Edwards and he’s in North Carolina, not one of the states Avvo has worked through yet. The site says that the states currently posted are…hmmm. It doesn’t.

The only issue I saw was the apparently duplicate ratings for Theodore Wells (why him ? b/c Scooter Libby was in the news yesterday), and the absence of a rating for Mychal Wilson (I get his newsletter and he IS in Cali).

Law 2.o ish ness

I can’t do this in one sitting either, so bear with me.

For now, I’ll leave you with the tag line for the site: “Ratings. Guidance. The Right Lawyer”.

I think that pretty much sums it up: the objective is to provide you with information so that you pick the right lawyer for you.

Here’s what I think, preliminarily…

If it’s a high level, I’ll pretend to ignore it. If it’s really low, I’ll hunt until I find the most famous, slammin’ lawyers on the site I can with the SAME rating, and then pretend to ignore it.

Then, if I ever find myself in court again, I’ll use it to either make an excuse to the judge,– or charge my client a higher fee.

Thanks to John Cook’s revised article, it looks like someone beat me to it: Lawyer ratings site not without objections.

Ambitious? Yes. Possible? Eh….probably. Liable to annoy the legal profession? Guaranteed.

And lawyers are better at litigation than real estate agents. So, this is going to be an interesting summer!!

Priceless.

Design

Design-wise, it’s too much like Zillow, but I suspect that’s a bit of the brand recognition thing I wrote about earlier this week. I hadn’t seen the design when I left there.Thank goodness it wasn’t done in Trebuchet!! Who knew? Honestly, I didn’t. To me that’s a really, really good thing. The color scheme is odd for a legal site, but it does convey “Hey, I am so, like your best friend!” I think the average web netizen will like it, and that’s important because people have to use the site for it to get better.

According to the article in our local paper, users add information by providing ratings to lawyers who served them. A good rating should raise the “Avvo Score” and a poor rating should lower it. The algorithm is not clear (for obvious reasons), but there will be some effect, whether or not it is proportionate.

It’s odd that one would assume that lawyers would want to “game the system,” because most won’t care much about a rating they can’t control. One thing that lawyers are, more than anything else, are control freaks. If we can’t control it, we tend to ignore it. Avvo’s task will be to MAKE lawyers care that there is a site out there providing a rating. It’s a challenge that will take time, and thus the importance of serious funding. They will have to ride out the server crashes and the lack of interest to get to a critical mass (tipping point??) where they simply become the default setting through sheer data power. This will take time, and since the legal profession grows at a phenomenal rate every year, a running to stand still strategy just won’t work. The team there are really smart,–you can bet they’ll come up with something.

Besides, good lawyers know that they have an ethical duty not to falsely advertise…a serious joke, because the purpose of ALL advertising is to sell you something, whether you really want it or not. How much truth is there in the average commercial??

On the other hand, what you add in because part of a Google-like data warehouse, so….the question is why not just build up one’s own web presence? I suppose that’s the important thing about sites like Avvo: they add value by consolidating useful information. It’s the hub theory that has made search engines, Digg and “social networking” sites into the huge successes they are. Sure, the information is already out there, but can you find it when you need it? And, more importantly: do you know the right questions to ask??

These are valid questions, and they are probably on to something. Still, the blog comments are overwhelmingly scathing, but I dunno…let’s give it chance!

Pro opinion from blog comments:

Hi John — I noticed your updated post on Avvo and wanted to comment on the News.com/CNET piece. As my post at CNET states, my concern is that the story obscures the big picture. Avvo’s site (www.avvo.com) is designed to help consumers choose the right lawyer to help them. The depth and breadth of our beta site is in those areas that drive roughly 85% of today’s internet searches for lawyers – areas like divorce, criminal, personal injury, etc. The person that is going through an emotional divorce, for example, will not get much help from a Supreme Court justice or attorney general.

We’ve saved consumers hours of research by aggregating information on every attorney licensed in the states we currently cover. And much of that information would be very difficult – if not impossible – for consumers to find without Avvo. We have more information on some attorneys than others and since the Avvo Rating is based upon what we know about an attorney, lack of information does affect the rating.

We worked with hundreds of attorneys and thousands of consumers in developing this site and it is clear that we’re delivering a valuable service even with this initial beta version.

I will keep you posted as we continue to develop the site.

Thanks,

Mark Britton
CEO, Avvo, Inc.

Con opinion from blog comments:

Then there’s the issue of the Avvo ranking algorithm itself. I found attorneys with rankings of “10″ with only years of experience and a positive review by a single attorney in their profile. Presumably positive client feedback could move them no higher, whereas negative feedback which could move them much lower can’t be factored in.

It’s apparent the Avvo system has some serious limitations that may be difficult to overcome. We shall see. Meanwhile, at least for now, it’s clear that consumers may be receiving quite a bit of misleading information.

Disclaimer

First, I worked there for 6 months as a contractor. Left in January 2007. So, there’s a TON of stuff I don’t know. Signed a non-disclosure, but honestly, I think things have moved so fast since I’ve been there, that I wouldn’t know any secrets to disclose if I could.

Second, I’ve been working on this stuff a LONG time. Anyone with a way-back machine could trace my web dev + law stuff back to about 1995 (when I built an Apache-level password access “client portal”), so I think I’ve got a pretty good idea about the evolution of legal technology on the web. My interest in the thing is purely from a Web 2.0 level (plenty of Chunky Bacon to play with here!). The legal stuff, I’ll deal with elsewhere, if the spirit moves me.

Third, I have NO idea what my Avvo rating is. I’ll look when they get Michigan up and running. I doubt I’ll care, but then again, I don’t know what it is yet!!

Mullen on Law 2.0+