For a while, it appeared that Avvo was doing so well. It made efforts to address many of the criticisms levied its way, particularly the taint faced by younger lawyers who were made to look either incompetent or questionable because they couldn’t produce the types of credentials that only come with time. It beat the old-timer, Martindale-Hubbell, to the internet punch big time. Avvo was definitely on the road. Or so I thought.
Yesterday, Avvo sent out notice of yet another paradigm shift in its business plan. I described the last one, Avvo Answers, as:
These are answers by lawyers to questions asked by potential clients. This is awful. Beyond the fact that the questions don’t provide sufficient information to formulate a meaningful answer, it is dangerous, seriously dangerous, to provide generic, sometimes erroneous, answers about complex legal issues. The lawyers who contribute to this feature get the benefit of self-promotion, but do so at the expense accuracy and credibility.
And some of my best lawyer friends decided to play this game. From what I hear, it hasn’t panned out too well for them. The people who want free legal advice don’t want to pay good money to retain counsel. Duh.
But Avvo’s raison d’être was to provide a public service, to let the legal services consumer have a place where they could find legitimate information about lawyers in order to make a reasoned decision. This, apparently, has not proven a sufficient business plan, meaning that Avvo needs a new plan. Here it is:
We are about to take our first step towards offering advertising opportunities for attorneys on Avvo. At the end of this week, if you visit designated pages on the site, such as the attorney search results or profile pages, you’ll see featured attorney listings like the one below.
Over the next couple of months, we’ll be testing different designs and placements throughout the site in order to best optimize potential leads for attorneys like you. Right now, only claimed lawyers will be featured randomly in our advertising listings. Also, attorneys who have contributed by answering questions in Avvo Answers or who have submitted a how-to Legal Guide will be featured more often than non-contributing lawyers.
Do you have any feedback? If so, we would love to hear your thoughts on the new featured listings and any questions you may have regarding advertising opportunities on Avvo. Take a quick survey (the first 250 respondents will receive a $500 advertising credit upon completion) or e-mail your feedback or questions–we’ll respond promptly.
So much for legitimacy, to the extent it existed before. Sure, many doubted that their gimmick, a single numerical rating, provided any measure of meaning or reliability. After all, what distinguishes the lawyer who receives a 6.2 rating from the one who gets a 6.7? The number was silly, and any consumer of legal services who ultimately selected a lawyer because of a .5 difference in the rating was just plain goofy. We knew it. Did they?
But now that Avvo has decided to abandon its claim of providing any legitimate insight to consumers, in favor of selling ad space to lawyers like all the other websites of the same ilk, it’s just another of the many versions of the Yellow Pages online. To the extent that it’s purportedly honest rating system deserved any credence at all, that’s now shot to hell. Now that Avvo lets money dictate who gets featured, and hence put in front of consumer eyeballs, the credibility of their ratings ceases to exist.
No doubt, Avvo will contend that its rating are still legitimate, untainted by cashflow. But it no longer matters. The point of the service, to the extent it ever had a point, was that all lawyers had an equal shot at being discovered by consumers, who would then be capable of ascertaining their worthiness as assessed by Avvo. That’s now a footnote to their cash and carry promotional scheme.
Every business (and Avvo is a business) needs a way to pay the rent. Apparently, the original business plan didn’t work, or at least not well enough. So Avvo slid down the slope of disrepute, ledge by ledge. It’s now hit the bottom. Good night, Mark, Paul and all my other Avvo buddies.
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Scott, we’ve always admired your independent voice, but your research is way off here. Avvo’s business plan from day one has been to run attorney advertising, and we’ve always been crystal-clear about that. Just take a look at any of the press around our launch (e.g., http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/businesstechnology/2003734582_avvo05.html) or the information on our site (http://www.avvo.com/support/lawyer_faq#Q004).
Hey Josh. You know, while the use of advertising as a revenue source is a very common business plan for websites, nowhere did Avvo say that the advertising would be in direct conflict with its proclaimed role of free lawyer marketing.
Advertising could be law books, CLEs, ladies underwear. Lots of websites raise revenue from advertising. Few do so in a way that directly conflicts with their primary purpose. And nowhere does Avvo state that the advertising that it would use would be from the very lawyers it claimed to be offering for free.
So I hope you will continue to admire my “independent voice” (for those who fear I might really be a shill for Avvo), but there are plenty of really good things to advertise that wouldn’t undermine Avvo’s credibility. But this ain’t one of them. Sorry.
Avvo should make use of its own service and ask its members if it is aiding and abetting UPL. After all, there are 50+ US jurisdictions and I note Avvo also allows UK and Canada law questions! No way they could avoid UPL in every possible jurisdiction – a disclaimer isn’t going to cut it with a state bar tribunal.
I am not a lawyer and have no connection to Avvo, but their model seems quite legitimate to me. It’s obviously modeled on Google and the other search engines. Does the presence of pay-per-click advertising and “sponsored links” invalidate the organic search results? Does the presence of automobile advertising in an automobile magazine invalidate the editorial content? People are obviously able to make the distinction and will in this case, as well.
No, you are not a lawyer, but thanks for playing.
I’ve always believed AVVO was a trojan horse being pushed into the kingdom as a gift. They are just proving me right. I never claimed my profile, never will.
Free is never free…and sometimes it can cost you big.
Here’s something interesting: I just visited Avvo to see this new “featured listings.” With Adblock Plus enabled in Firefox, the title to the box of listings (“featured listings”) does not display. The attorneys still show up, but there is nothing to distinguish them from the actual search results. If I disable Adblock Plus, the “featured listings” title shows up.
So let’s recap: For people who surf the internet with one of the most popular ad-blockers, they won’t see any indication on Avvo that the advertising is actually a paid position. They will just think these attorneys must be awesome to be highlighted apart from everyone else.
Wow. Good find. I wonder if that might bother Avvo any?
I have no idea what that means. It sounds clever, but does not address any of the points I made. I mentioned that I was not a lawyer in order to say that I have no financial interest in the debate. It still seems silly to me to criticize the use of paid advertising in conjunction with other non-paid material. Does the presence of advertising invalidate the news stories in The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal?
Sorry. My Rabbi, Joel, says that I get too prickly when dealing with non-lawyers and I need to be more patient.
Lawyers are not cars. Avvo is not Car & Driver. Avvo was (and remains) the subject of a great deal of criticism for its basic offering, a single numerical rating of lawyers suggesting their relative competency. Avvo is also subject of substantial controversy because of the legal and ethical implications of some of its side ventures, particularly Avvo Answers, which raises ethical and potentially criminal issues by lawyers seeking to raise their Avvo profile.
The argument made by Avvo in justification for its existence, its access to records, and its dubious involvement is that it provides a unique service to the public by offering access to information about lawyers that is entirely unbiased, thereby providing a consumer resource untainted by commercial interest. Similarly, Avvo has induced lawyers to claim their profile and provide additional information upon the representation that all lawyers would be placed on equal footing, with no lawyer favored above another, and only their rating, based upon a secret algorythm, to distinguish one from another. Critically, no lawyer need pay to take his place, on equal footing with every other lawyer, on Avvo.
So having established their claim, obtained information from government sources, addressed the concerns of various states’ ethical arbiters, induced attorneys to participate, they have now introduced advertising which places the paid-up lawyer in the place where Avvo represented that no commercial interest would apply.
So your comparisons with other media miss the point, which is what lawyers are aware of because we have followed Avvo since its inception, but non-lawyers are not. If you would like to learn more, search SJ for other posts about Avvo and you can first learn a little bit about the subject before rendering an opinion.
Mark, a PPC model is fine. But Avvo professes to be a way for consumers to find better lawyers thru a rating system of sorts. This trumps that rating system in many ways.
The Death of AV
Kevin O’Keefe reports that Martindale-Hubbell, the grande dame of lawyer raters, appeared to have given up.