Late last week, an after-hours call came into my office. It was a young woman from New England in need of a lawyer for her friend. I called her back and learned that she had gotten my name from Avvo. Now, I’ve written quite a bit about the efficacy of Avvo, as has the rest of the blawgosphere, but this was the first time that I’m aware of that someone actually used Avvo and came up with my name.
The woman explained to me that she had gotten a referral locally to a New York lawyer, but she wasn’t thrilled with her choice. Consequently, she decided to use the internet to find a different lawyer. Somehow, she stumbled on Avvo and found me.
I emailed Avvo co-founder and Vice President Paul Bloom to let him know. He urged me to post about it, but I wasn’t entirely sure whether I should and, if I did, what exactly I thought about it. One call doesn’t validate a process.
As far as the caller went, she wanted to find a lawyer but the case wasn’t all that serious and it was in Westchester County, some distance from my office (meaning that it required substantial travel time). Given financial priorities, it seemed more appropriate for her to retain an attorney closer to the courthouse. I referred her to an excellent local attorney.
She expressed appreciation for the name, and then told me that he was one of the dozen lawyers whose names she had located via the internet. It was her plan of action to call each of them and discuss the case and their fee structure. Since I had already taken myself out of the running for the case, I decided to give a little paternalistic unsolicited advice.
In the old days, a potential client might get one or two names of attorneys. On a bad day, three names. They would call and meet with them, make a decision and be represented. This was usually doable, though the time that it would take to meet with the two or three lawyers left the defendant unrepresented during a critical period. But this was the price of being thorough, and within a few days a lawyer would be retained.
Things are different now. As this young woman made me realize, the list of potential attorneys has grown exponentially. It was now overwhelming. There was no possible way she could meet a dozen lawyers in a timely fashion. Moreover, she frankly had no ability to assess their relative qualifications in any event, making this dozen appointments a monumental waste of everyone’s time. She would gather so much information that she would be paralyzed, unable to reach a reasoned decision and incapable of making any meaningful comparison. All the while, the defendant would be effectively without counsel.
There are some placed on earth where there may only be a handful of criminal defense lawyers in the area. New York City is not one of those places. Too much information is just as useless as too little. It also brings out the worst of lawyer in the effort to get the case, both in self-hype and for those inclined to denigrate others. Let us say that, in broad strokes, there are 200 top criminal defense lawyers in New York City. Can someone tell me how a person is supposed to chose when you can access all of them from your keyboard?
I received an email from the Westchester County lawyer to whom I referred the case. He met with the young woman over the weekend, and thought the meeting went very well. But she told him at the end of the meeting that she couldn’t make a decision yet, as she had appointments to meet more lawyers. She found them on Avvo. As far as I’m aware, she has yet to retain counsel.
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Scott,
As I’ve come to expect from your posts, you make a a couple of interesting points.
The first is that consumers are using Avvo as part of their attorney search process. Note that I say as “part” of their process, as this woman clearly used Avvo to create a short list (ok, maybe not so short) and is doing the appropriate due diligence to call and meet with lawyers. We have heard from many attorneys — here comes the “self promotional crap” — who have generated multiple clients through Avvo.
The second point you make regards the ease of getting so many attorney names that it’s virtually impossible to choose between them. Isn’t this is a problem that can be said of any topic where content can be found on the Internet (that is to say, every topic) whether it be doctors, attorneys, or cell phones (oh, for the good old days when I could buy the single handset that my local Verizon store was pushing rather than research available options on CNET). How to address this? There is no simple answer, but one approach is to provide consumers with the tools to help them hone in the information that is most relevant to them (e.g. if you aren’t interested in clients that live so far away, we could build that into the search results algorithm). Google has built a decent business doing just this 🙂
Hey Paul,
I agree with you on the second point. This isn’t an Avvo problem, as much as an internet phenomenon. Where there was once too little access to information, there is now too much (and more every day). In this instance, the young woman used Avvo to broaden her search, likely far beyond anythin useful to the point of making it impossible to make a decision and move forward. My guess is that she’ll eventually finish her list and end up retaining the last attorney she met who charges what she is willing to pay.
As far as attorneys’ interest in clients, I don’t think it’s of any consequence where the client is coming from, as much as our time being taken up in meeting clients who have or will interview a dozen other lawyers. When clients shop around, a lot of time is wasted. We would much prefer to meet with serious clients who come to us for a reason, not just because they found our name on a list with a dozen other potential lawyers.
Part of this problem for the shoppers is that they have limited means from the outset, and they don’t know if they’re in our ballpark and we don’t know if we’re in theirs. This was always the case, but the numbers change when the clients are interviewing a dozen lawyers instead of two or three.
In other lines of business, one market response to this problem would be a branding system, perhaps involving franchises. Call it, say, SimpleJustice(TM). You’d sell this franchise to a limited number of lawyers in each court system in the state (or the country if we’re thinking big).
The advantage to the clients of using a SimpleJustice(TM) lawyer is that you’ve carefully chosen the lawyers to eliminate the lazy, the foolish, the inexperienced, and the weak.
The advantage to the lawyers is that the SimpleJustice(TM) brand serves as in indicator of their quality, which makes it easier to get customers. You’d probably also provide region-wide advertising and a referal web site. The member lawyers would pay you for this.
As the network of SimpleJustice(TM) providers grows, you could might be able to offer other services to lawyers, such as a referal network for expert witnesses, a paralegal pool, and bulk purchase pricing of legal pads (obviously, I have no idea how a law practice works).
I’m sure there’s some good reason why this doesn’t work for defense lawyers, otherwise we’d see it happening. However, you do see this sort of thing in other professions, such as doctor’s offices joining a medical group, and I think you could argue that the big multi-state civil lawfirms are a form of the same thing with a different legal organization.
You know, that’s not as crazy as it seems. The biggest stumbling block is that states have varying degrees of restrictions on lawyers, ranging from trade names to advertising to representations of quality.
On the other hand, the reason this has never been done well in the past is that the few firms that have tried it, like Jacoby & Meyers, have sold themselves on price rather than quality. Price has always been the issue in criminal defense, largely because people can’t distinguish between quality representation and inexpensive representation. They know if they win; they don’t know if their lawyers sucked.
But a nationwide group of criminal defense lawyers, vetted for experience and competency and provided with nationwide support services, under a group-branded advertising umbrella, may well be the wave of the future.
Any thoughts from the rest of the brain trust?