That was one of the questions on my 2014 Legal Professions final exam. Some of the most thoughtful answers replied, in effect, “My personal preferences are not relevant. Avvo, or something like it, is the wave the future.”
Among lawyers, knowledge of Avvo is extraordinarily uneven. Yet, that has not dissauded venture capitalist into investing over $60 million into the venture. Indeed, from an investor point of view, the lack of awareness among lawyers may be a distinct advantage.
What is Avvo?
If you are a lawyer and have never heard of Avvo, there is good chance your clients are primarily organzational clients, such as corporations. Alternatively, you may be law professor, like me, whose livelihood is not dependent our ability to attract clients who will pay to help solve their legal problems. Those of us in legal education should know about Avvo, but we don’t.
Avvo is web portal designed to attract ordinary citizens who are looking for guidance with their legal problems. Avvo has a comprehensive set of bulletin board forums where anyone can find a lot of answers to questions related to family law, DUIs, personal bankruptcy, immigration, criminal defense, foreclosure law, landlord tenant, and speeding ticket law. The answers are supplied by licensed attorneys.
Why are lawyers giving away their knowledge? Primarily to impress readers. If you are looking for answers on Avvo, chances are pretty good that you have a legal problem and that you are sizing up your options. For attorneys, this is akin to a food festival–more business flows to those who fare well in a comparative taste test. Thus, the highly capable who are looking to grow in this market–a important caveat–have a strong incentive to show up.
Avvo was founded in 2007 by Mark Britton, the former general counsel of Expedia. Obviously, he is somewhat who understand the power of a network-effects business. Some people have called Avvo a “Yelp for lawyers.” In fact, some the venture capitalists now invested in Avvo also invested in Yelp. And that investment work out well, as Yelp turned down large acquition offers from Google and Yahoo in favor of going public.
Besides the Avvo Answers forums, Avvo has a lot more features that are likely to influence a consumer’s buy decision. It also has a huge head-start on network effects. I will get to those items shortly. But before that, I want to acknowledge the presence of a large elephant that may be invisible to many readers.
Zip Codes and World Views
My instincts tell me that the readers of the Legal Whiteboard are not the same demographic as those who might retain an attorney based on information gathered from Avvo. Nearly 70% of working adults over the age of 25 don’t have a four-year college degree. Among the 30+% who obtained a bachelor’s degree, less than one in five go on to attain either a professional degree or a doctorate. This latter group is an elite demographic–only 3.2% of working adults.
Yet, among us lawyers, there is another subdivision. As documented by researchers in the famous Chicago Lawyers I and Chicago Lawyers II studies, the single most important structural feature of the bar is the type of client a lawyer serve–people or organizations. See A Second Look at the Second City, Legal Affairs (Nov/Dec 2005); Counterpoint, LWB (Mar. 17, 2014).
Lawyers who serve organizational clients tend to graduate from more elite law schools. They also tend to belong to different bar associations and social clubs; live and work in different zip codes; and, on balance, come from more affluent family backgrounds. As of 1995, approximately 64% of lawyers in the Chicago metropolitan bar served primarily organizational clients (Chicago Lawyers II), up from 53% in 1975 (Chicago Lawyers I). If the American Bar Foundation conducts a Chicago Lawyer III in 2015, we would expect the percentage to be even higher. Law professors tend to have more in common with lawyers who serve organizations rather than lawyers who serve people.
So what is my point here? Most lawyers and law professors are not in a good position to have an intelligent, detached conversation about something like Avvo because, as a group, we are miles and miles away from life problems and social networks of the typical Avvo user. Our clients, to the extent we have any, come from other sources, and our days are spent talking to other college graduates. Avvo is not disrupting our business model. Nor is it offering us a lifeline to paying clients. Yet we are elites, and Avvo is nominally part of our industry. So, as a group, we are at heighten risk of having strong opinions that run significantly ahead of our knowledge of actual facts.
We may not know much about Avvo, but Avvo has made quite an effort to know something about us.
Avvo has compiled a near complete universe of U.S. lawyers, as the company initially populated its website by obtaining attorney licensure information from state bar authorities–including information on disciplinary actions, which it publishes along side an attorney’s other information. Avvo claims to have profiles of 95% of U.S. lawyers. Further, most lawyers have an Avvo 1-10 quality rating, which is based on a proprietary algorithm of biographical information either reported by the attorney or scraped from the web. Yet, the influence of one’s Avvo score is moderated by:
- Your “contributor score” on Avvo forums, which quantifies your participation on Avvo.
- Non-anonymous peer endorsements from fellow attorneys
- Your answers to legal questions (prospective clients may not be able to evaluate the quality of legal advice, but they surely can and do evaluate communication sytle and responsiveness)
- Reviews, positive and negative, from current and former clients
So do the math. If you are attorney with a bar license, chances are you have an Avvo profile. I did not realize I had an Avvo profile until I read about Avvo raising $37.5 million in a Series D round of venture capital.
Opinions about Avvo
My interest in Avvo has three parts: (a) as a topic of research–I study the legal profession and legal labor markets, (b) as an educator–I need to prepare my students for the world as it actually exist, not as its presented in pop culture or how I remember it before I joined a law faculty, and (c) as a member of the legal profession–all of us are obligated to help the bar regulate itself in the public interest. See paragraph [6], Preamble to the Model Rules.
When Avvo collects big checks from venture capitalists, all three dimensions of my interest are full engaged.
When I began exploring this topic by making it a topic of conversation among lawyers, the responses can generally be group into four categories.
1. “This type of coercion of lawyers should not be permitted.” Someone has built a internet profile based on our biographical information and rendered an opinion, in the form of an algorithmic score. We did not opt-in. We can’t opt-out. Frankly, its irritating to not have complete control over how information about us is packaged and used. Several lawyers have challenged Avvo right to keep them in or the veracity of the assembled information. Yet, Avvo has fared remarkably well in court. See, e.g., Avvo Wins Free Speech Suit, Puget Sound Business Journal (Apr. 2, 2012).
2. “The 1-10 lawyer ratings are not accurate.” Setting aside their own profiles, many lawyer who peruse Avvo for the first time are struck by the fact that many of their friends and colleagues have mediocre Avvo score. In most cases, the scores would go up if the profiles were claimed and supplemented. Similar to US News law school rankings, the perceived slop in the Avvo numbers becomes a basis to mock it as invalid–indeed, the lawyers I talked to seemed to revel in the mockery. That said, a correlation need not be perfect to be either positive or useful. Consumers appear to find the Avvo rating useful.
3. “The client reviews can mislead or be gamed.” This is variant of the inaccurate ratings point. One bad review can be given undue weight. Likewise, positive reviews may be complete fiction yet fool people. But is this problem more serious than similar gaming on Yelp or Amazon? When it comes to online reviews, our minds are generally put at ease by numerous reviews that appear to be written at different times by different people. In making buy decisions, a huge proportion of lawyers use web-based review systems, presumably because we find them useful. Is there a principled basis for carving out our own services from consumer review?
4. “The quality of advice on the answers forum is poor.” It is safe to say that advice given on Avvo is bound to be variable in quality. Some of it will surely be bad. But what about the quality of advice given behind closed doors–how do we know that is any good? Moreover, private legal advice can be very expensive, putting it beyond the reach of many ordinary citizen.
This last point is quite important. At the “Chasing Change” panel on Saturday at the ABA Annual Meetings, my co-panelists Jordan Furlong and Renee Knake presented statistics showing that 85% to 90% of all legal needs go unmet because citizens lack the means to hire a lawyer. Indeed, ask any state court judge about the growing volume of pro se litigant. Are people in the 85% made better off, or worst off, by the Avvo Q&A forums? Whether the issue is loss of income or loss of control over our online presentation, we need to wary of being influenced by the bug of self-interest.
Thinking Like a Business
What is striking about the four recurring reactions to Avvo is that they are very lawyer-centric. The lawyers I talked with focused on the flaws in Avvo methodology, the impingement on lawyers’ ability to control their own information, and the potential harm to citizens who rely on the Avvo Q&A forums.
Yet, are there any countervailing consumer benefits? That the business case, after all, that garnered the interest of the venture capitalists. In my experience, most lawyers have a hard time seeing the world through the eyes of people who can not afford their legal services. Ironically, our ethics rules implore us to focus on the needs of those who cannot afford access to the legal system. Yet, it by no means comes naturally to us.
In the famous Schultz-Zedeck study on lawyer effectiveness, one of the 26 effectiveness factors is “the ability to see the world through the eyes of others.”
with legal problems, and flaws in Avvo methodology.
What I find so striking
This blog is read primarily by 3.2 percenters. The primary way that Avvo monetizes its network is by letting lawyer upgrade their Avvo profile. Additional functionality, such as links to your website or cusomizing aspects of your profile page, can be purchased for a modest monthy sum. And by all appearances, Avvo is delivering a steady stream of paying clients for many of its lawyers.
In short, Avvo’s business model is taking a small skim off of housand lawyers who find that Avvo can deliver clients.
If a company takes substantial venture capital money seven years after launching, it means that some very discerning investors are fairly confident that the business is poised to take off.
What is your Avvo rating?
$62 million in venture capital founding
claimed my Avvo profile. I did not realize I had one until I read about Avvo raising Avvo is an online forum that enables consumers to find and rate lawyers. It was founded in 2007 by Mark Britton, the former general counsel of Expedia. If a company takes substantial venture capital money seven years after launching, it means that some very discerning investors are fairly confident that the business is poised to take off.
The recent press clippings on Avvo inspired me to create a classroom exercise for my Legal Professions tested out Avvo from the perspective of the ordinary consumer. Specifically, I gave nine students a signficant legal problem (catastrophic illness leading to personal bankruptcy, a “third strike” DUI, an ugly child custody issue, immigration issues, etc.). The remaining students were paired with one of the hapless class mates and were instructed to then instructed to find an attorney on Avvo from their own hometowns who appeared best equipped to handle their friend’s tough legal problem. In addition, for the purposes of the exercise, the students were told to discount their sophisticated educations and social networks. Hence, finding an attorney on Avvo made more sense.
The nine students saddled with a serious legal probem thus had roughly six attorneys to choose from. Frankly, from a consumer perspective, Avvo did remarkably well.
- Each student found an attorney with substantial experience specialization in the area of need.
- Most of the attorneys they were choosing from had Avvo quality scores in the 8 to 10 range, which seemed to comport with their more comprehensive Avvo bios. In short, they looked qualified and competent, at least from far away.
- Most attorneys had additional narrative reviews from former client or endorsements from other attorneys.
- Virtually all had photos, which were surprisingly influential to students.
- Any record of adverse action from state bar officials
- Most students select attorneys who provided a free 30 or 60 minute consultation.
Students seemed to really enjoy the exercise, as they seemed to have ample good choices to choose from, thus enabling them to weigh to seemingly irrelevant factors such an attractive photo. But how irrelevant is a photo, or a laundry list of honorifics, or glowing testimonials that might well have been written by mom or one’s spouse?
When the class discussion turn to