Avvo is a new company that lets people find good attorneys, letting them seeing how others have rated the lawyers, and whether they have been disciplined. It lets users rate attorneys too.
Avvo is bound to stir controversy. Lawyers given bad ratings are already disturbed. See the story by John Cook of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. One poorly rated criminal defense lawyer calls it “a joke.”
This can be a very valuable service. However, it is open to abuse, because many clients don’t fully grasp some matters, and can easily get upset with their attorneys because by default, attorneys lose about half the time. This is the same problem we discussed about Thefunded, where entrepreneurs leave comments about venture capitalists. It also has similarities to Zillow, a a company that places an estimated value on peoples’ homes and which has upset some homeowners
See screenshot below, showing an example of the criminal defense lawyer rating page. For the lowest rated attorneys, the site warns “extreme caution.”
Other competing directories exist, including Martindale-Hubbell, FindLaw and AttorneyPages, but Avvo providers more ways for consumers and other lawyers to provide feedback.
Silicon Valley’s Benchmark Capital and Bellevue, Washington’s Ignition Partners invested $10 million into Avvo in April. We first wrote about Avvo a year ago, when it was still secretive, and after it got its first $3 million batch of capital.
3 Comments
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Paul Bloom -- Avvo co-founder said:
Hi Matt,
There has been a lot of discussion regarding Avvo’s client ratings, with some people predicting that only dissatisfied clients would post ratings. To date we’ve had over 500 client ratings submitted, with the vast majority being positive. This is consistent with the results from a recent Ipsos survey (sponsored by Avvo), which found that only 12% of consumers were not satisfied with their lawyer. So, at least so far, it seems that the fear of negative ratings has not be borne out.
That said, we don’t believe that anyone should choose a lawyer soley based on a rating. Consumers can use ratings as one tool to help them select a lawyer, but should definitely meet with the lawyer and do additional research before making this kind of decision.
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Kat Duke said:
I looked at the site. They slapped up a little bit of public info without verifying accuracy or putting any effort into obtaining supporting info. I think the site wants to coerce attys into participating, ie supporting their efforts by correcting the misinformation they carelessly throw up. For me they could in no way have arrived the practice percentage they posted based on public info. It is obviously wrong. So I make the presumption the entire site of the same quality and accuracy.
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Pat said:
Steve Berman is now going after this most horrid of ventures. How could they possibly not see that applying such a subjective and coercive system to professionals (especially lawyers of all people) would lead to nothing but difficulty? Easy - ad dollars.
They are finished.
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