For as long as I can remember, Martindale-Hubbell used to be the only game in town.  Lawyer were peer rated under a screwy lettering system for competence and ethics, with AV being the top rating.  But there’s a new player in town, Avvo. 

And so, I decided to check Avvo to see how I was rated.  Lo and behold, my rating was a 6.5, good but not excellent. Mind you, I received the same rating as David Boies (a lot of people confuse the two of us).  I was deeply offended, so I checked the other tabs to see what the rating was based on.  Surprise!  They had absolutely no information on me.  So, I wondered, what the hell did they base the 6.5 rating on?  From what I can tell, it was utterly baseless.  I could be the worst lawyer in New York, possibly the world, and could have gotten that rating.

My next move was to check out the ratings given other lawyers that I knew, and knew to be excellent lawyers.  Same deal as me, no info and nonsensical rating.

So then I came up with a brainstorm.  Check under the genre of criminal defense lawyers.  I wanted to see who was there, and see how they were rated.  In my case, they didn’t even have the information that I was a criminal defense lawyer.  I guess I was just plain old good for a PI lawyer, even though I’m not a PI lawyer.

So I dove into New York criminal defense lawyers, and there was a long list.  The only problem was that I saw name after name that I had never heard of.  Never.  Now if you’ve been around for a while, you get to know pretty much everybody who works in your field.  But these names were utterly foreign to me.  The one recurring theme was that they all worked for firms.  Now while there are a handful of firms that do criminal defense (to some greater or lesser extent), this is a business that is very personal and largely a small and solo practice.  These names were often Biglaw, and as we all know, they don’t REALLY do criminal defense. 

But there were a few names I recognized on the list of criminal defense lawyers, like that famed defender of the downtrodden, Rudy Giuliani.  Unfortunately for Rudy, like me, they had zero information on him.  I guess they hadn’t heard much about him yet, which doesn’t bode well for his presidential run.  What about Gerald Shargel, one of the best in town.  A 6.5 rating, just like me!  Well at least they got that right. 

Turning to the establishment, what about former EDNY United States Attorney and United States Magistrate  Zachary Carter.  Bingo, Zach got a 7.0 rating, meaning very good.  Still not excellent, but finally we moved off the dime.  And finally, I decide to slum a bit by checking out fellow blawger, Mark Bennett. Ouch, only a 6.3 rating.  Like me, they have absolutely no info on Mark, but I figure I got an extra 2/10s because I’m just better looking, and that’s got to be worth something, right? UPDATE: Even as I was writing this, Mark’s rating went from a mere “good” to “excellent”, proving that I am not better looking (and more importantly, that Mark IS an excellent lawyer).

So having spent about 10 minutes looking around Avvo, a thought occurred to me.  That’s 10 minutes of my life that I will never get back.  Maybe someday the Avvo ratings will mean something, but for now, they are so utterly, completely and totally useless as to make me wonder what compelled them to open up their shop before they had their act together.  But I have no doubt that the Biglaw guys will be jockeying for Avvo position, because they have no other way to prove their self-worth until they get their once-in-a-lifetime chance to actually go to court and play lawyer.