If you’re a web worker, your online life is shot through with ratings, rankings, and peer-to-peer connections. Whether it’s setting the noise level on a site like SlashDot, keeping an eye on the top stories at Digg, or depending on feedback to decide whether a seller at Ebay is reliable, we’ve all gotten used to the idea that there is wisdom in crowds. So why not let the crowds help you in picking an attorney when you need one. Right? Except legal eagles think it is a bad idea.
That’s why the recent launch of lawyer-rating site Avvo and a subsequent lawsuit are worth knowing about. Depending on what happens here, this particular bit of Web 2.0 could run up against some old-fashioned Law 1.0 in a way that puts a lot of sites out of business. If the plaintiffs win, be prepared to have many of the sites that you depend on change substantially.
Here are the facts (keep in mind the usual I Am Not A Lawyer disclaimer): Avvo lists all the lawyers in the country and rates them on a 1 to 10 scale. The rating algorithm is (shades of Google) proprietary and secret, but takes into account things like years of experience, published articles, professional memberships, and so on. It also takes into account information supplied by lawyers themselves, such as awards they’ve received, and endorsements from one lawyer to another.
Now Avvo has been sued by a pair of Washington State attorneys (in a complaint that applies for class-action status) on the grounds that the Avvo rating system is unfair and deceptive and thus violates the Washington Consumer Protection Act which provides simply:
Unfair methods of competition and unfair or deceptive acts or practices in the conduct of commerce are hereby declared unlawful.
The basic thrust of the argument is that the Avvo system is unreliable, subject to manipulation, biased, and inaccurate, and so generally bad that it needs to be shut down. There are some additional grounds of action that are peculiar to the case (based on the fact that Avvo’s CEO himself is a lawyer and may be violating professional ethics by publicly rating other lawyers), but clearly the major count is so broad that it applies to just about any peer ratings based system, or any site that ranks and rates people at all.
How much should you worry about this if you run a Web 2.0 site with a ratings system? It’s hard to say at this point. Avvo, of course, promises to fight the lawsuit, apparently on First Amendment grounds. And legal analyst Denise Howell suggests that there’s another potential defense in the part of the Communications Decency Act that shields service providers who only distill information that they pass along from others.
Still, we all know that the courts are capable of most anything, and internet law is far from settled. This is an area that warrants monitoring, and if your business depends on ratings and rankings (particularly of a potentially litigious community) you ought to start thinking about contingency plans in case Avvo loses.
Thanks for the post,–this is an area I am very concerned about and am blogging the issue of Law 2.0, so I’d really love to hear what you think about it. You can see my thoughts at two places: Mullen on Law 2.0+ (for technical web 2.0 + law) and Illegal Patterns (for litigation issues).
I agree that web 2.0 is a reality, but web 2.0 technology is barely scratching the surface with the Avvo site. What they’ve done is impressive, but it’s really a value-added legal directory. What I’m looking for is a substantive approach of taking public data and using it to actively help clients understand and participate in the LAW, not just having a sense of who lawyers are. There’s where real change will occur.
A rating system is helpful, but does it reduce litigation (generally seen as a good thing)? Does it help consumers avoid legal pitfalls? Not really. I prefer the Nolo approach, but also find that Avvo is adding value,–it’s too early to tell yet where that value will truly be. The cool thing about web 2.0 is that it’s a lot easier to turn on whatever dime they need to in order to provide signfiicant value to the legal market.
How many Digg clones really add value? It’s not easy to do, but they’ve made a valiant effort and I’m sure we’ll see many more of the same in the next year as techies figure out what to do and how to do it.
[...] left elsewhere… Filed under: Avvo, Function — medeator @ 5:43 pm On the Web Worker Daily blog: Thanks for the post,–this is an area I am very concerned about and am blogging the issue of Law [...]
A copy of the complaint is here.
If you read it, I think you’ll get a better idea of what the plaintiffs’ concerns are.
Well, I found a grammatical error on page 3, slightly ironic since this is a lawsuit about lawyers having their reputation damaged by others. I stopped reading around page 5.
As for the meat of the problem there should probably be a bit more transparency on Avvo’s part, and why not include a win/loss ratio for lawyers who work in the courtroom? I think a lot of people would be interested to see that.
The broad language of the original complaint doesn’t mean much about what the result would be if the lawyers won. That said, the fact that a lawyer is running this has a lot to do with it, I’m guessing: it’s somebody in the same line of work rating his competition.
and why not include a win/loss ratio for lawyers who work in the courtroom?
It might be interesting, but it wouldn’t tell you a whole lot about how ‘good’ your lawyer is. If your lawyer is excellent at forcing the other side to come up with fat settlements, they’ll never be in trial.
As a non-lawyer, I for one am happy the issue of AVVO has come outside the Legal blogger world. I find it funny, suit based on Consumer Protection, no I don’t consider Lawyers consumers needing protection. The design effort to protect the consumer from misleading information. You mean getting the general public’s reaction or input, by which if not flattering, it must be misleading.
The system exposes two things overlooked: 1) the information collected was obtained from data bases that have not been updated or purged in years. AVVO takes the hit, the source should be exposed for lack of maintenance.
2) Customer Satisfaction – would you care to explain where a consumer can go to get satisfaction if they feel Service was less than exceptable.
Customer Satisfaction IS CUSTOMER INPUT. Now you want to control the open forum too what Customers can say or better yet what others can post/print/blog about you. As a business we subject ourselves to this, now all of sudden Lawyers are not a business or subject to different rules.
Let’s face a few ideas: Top Lawyers within a field are not going to be concerned with a web-site ranking system that by all intent purposes brings them back to the pack. Saying a Fortune 500 company made its decision on legal representation based on web-site: that company is going down. The site is geared toward the other millions of people that need legal support in a simple easy to read format. The site is geared toward the 70%+ Small/Solo firms throughout this country who’s main concern is finding NEW Business or Paying Clients.
Here’s a thought, which is why I love pirates, move the site off-shore. Put the tag line: Attorneys hate us – You Opinion matters. Focus an gathering the users of the free world. Right now the traffic is what more attorney’s, like they would help each other make a buck. AVVO should take a million of their fund money and blast the media right NOW. This is business, not law, gather the consumers like they would side with lawyers.
[...] Web Worker Daily ? Blog Archive Lawyers vs. Web 2.0 ?Lawyers vs. Web 2.0. If you?re a web worker, your online life is shot through with ratings, rankings, and peer-to-peer connections. Whether it?s setting the … [...]
[...] good news for Avvo, and for any site that crunches variables to assign a rating. As Mike Gunderloy observed when the suit against Avvo was filed, this includes a good deal of the Web 2.0 ecosystem. While [...]