For those of you (blissfully) not in the know, Avvo is basically “Facebook for Lawyers.” Lawyers can create profiles, upload pictures and information about themselves, and answer questions that potential clients post on the site or e-mail to the attorney through the site. Clients can also review attorneys, and Avvo provides a “rating” for lawyers based on various factors. That sounds all well and good, except for one seriously obnoxious facet of the site: There’s no way for an attorney to opt out.
Almost as soon as I passed the bar, I started getting deluged with e-mail from Avvo telling me to “claim” my profile. I never registered for Avvo, nor created any sort of profile with them. The company simply creates a profile for you automatically without any input on your part. These invitation e-mails are essentially thinly-veiled threats, because the implication is if you don’t “claim your profile” you’ll have no idea what people are saying about you or control over how you’re portrayed on Avvo.
Imagine if Facebook simply created a profile for you without any input on your part, and provided information about you and contact information to the general public. Needless to say, I am seriously pissed off by people who try to pressure me into doing something I have no interest in doing, especially when the goal is solely to make them money. To this day, I have not “claimed my profile” on Avvo and I never will. I refuse to even look at it and give them ad revenue. I have no idea if there’s any reviews at all, glowing ones, or damning ones.
Furthermore, Avvo has the potential to be disastrous to your practice and reputation (particularly if you are a solo or small firm attorney), because Avvo will allow just about anyone to post a review of you and your services. Angry people with a personal vendetta against you can post bad reviews, and so can people you turned away who were never your client. Your only recourse is to then go through Avvo’s dispute procedures to try to get the review removed. Good luck with that. Why should I, or any other attorney, be forced to waste their valuable time to get a bogus review taken down off a site that they never signed up for or wanted to be a part of?
What also differentiates Avvo from something like Yelp (which I have no beef with; Yelp didn’t flood my inbox with e-mails telling me to “claim my profile” or assign me an arbitrary rating) is that Avvo offers the appearance of legitimacy, like they are some sort of official body that is responsible for rating lawyers. And sure, Avvo claims in their official statements that they are just providing an “opinion” and it’s only for informational purposes, but are most consumers going to actually sift through the legalese to find that out? Granted, this sort of lawyer rating thing has been around forever with things like Martindale-Hubbell and Super Lawyers, but neither of those two compelled your participation like Avvo does.
To be clear, Avvo has no authority or control over lawyers. They are simply a private company with no official power. Their rating system is utterly meaningless. Avvo cannot discipline me. Avvo cannot disbar me. Avvo cannot force me to do a single thing I don’t want to do. Their rating can be very easily gamed by soliciting “peer endorsements” and answering questions on Avvo.com. It is wholly unrelated to the actual legal skills of the lawyer. Trust me when I say that any lawyer who has the time to spend hours a day, every day trying to get peer endorsements, answering questions on Avvo, or otherwise trying to pump their pointless Avvo number is seriously in need of work. A busy attorney won’t have the time for this; they will be too occupied representing their clients.
I find it especially amusing that on many of the Avvo answers the attorney has some 6-7 paragraph disclaimer, often longer than their actual answer, about how there’s no attorney-client relationship formed, how they’re only licensed to practice in a certain state, and blah blah blah. If you’re only licensed in California, then what the hell is the point of trying to answer a state-law-specific legal question from someone in Nebraska (other than precious Avvo points that is)?
Further, most clients provide virtually no facts (not being lawyers, they don’t know what’s important or not), so providing a proper answer is impossible. “can i take my kid out of state?” Gee, I don’t know, is there a custody agreement in place, is the mother/father aware, how long are you taking them out of state for, is there a divorce proceeding going on? I don’t even practice Family Law and these are just a few of the things I’d need answered before I could even begin to answer this question.
This is why the traditional face-to-face office consultation is so important, so all these little details can be examined and drawn out. I shudder to think that someone would go onto Avvo, ask a seriously deficient question like the one above, and then take the advice of some random out-of-state lawyer just because they had a 10/10 rating. I’m imagining a teary-eyed defendant screaming, “But Judge, he had a 10/10 on Avvo!” as they are dragged away in handcuffs.
The whole online, free question and answer thing demeans the profession. Lawyers should be paid for their time spent answering legal questions; that’s why we went to college for 4 years of our lives, law school for 3 more years, spent (or, in most cases, borrowed) many thousands of dollars, passed a horrible, multi-day bar exam, and passed a rigorous background examination. Truly unfortunate people who cannot afford to pay anything can go to Legal Aid and get a real answer to their question or real representation.
I personally end up giving many free consults to people when I determine their problem isn’t one I can handle or one that doesn’t need a lawyer. But in those cases I get all the facts first, do my research, and provide a detailed, proper answer, customized to that specific client and case. Lawyers aren’t $8/hour customer service representatives, and we need to stop acting like it.
I’m not going to go (online or elsewhere) and beg strangers to hire me, that’s absolutely ridiculous (as well as against ethical rules, which do control lawyers). Lawyers are not used car salesmen, hawking our wares for the cheapest price possible to try and undercut the competition. Is it any wonder that the general public views most lawyers as con-men or sleazeballs when we collectively act like glorified telemarketers? Finding a lawyer should be a little more dignified than shopping for a rug in a bazaar.
Lawyers are professionals. We are entrusted with an enormous degree of responsibility. We often hold people’s finances, lives, and very freedom in our hands. When you pick a lawyer, do so based off of that lawyer’s reputation among people you trust, their qualifications, and if you feel comfortable with them at the initial interview. Don’t do it based off an arbitrary number.