A number of folks have already written about how New York has dealt another setback for Avvo Legal Services in the form of NY State Bar Ethics Op. 1132 which found that New York lawyers could not participate in Avvo Legal Services because payment of Avvo’s marketing fee amounts to payment for recommendation of services in violation of New York’s Rule 7.2(a).
You can read the full opinion here. You can read some other pieces elaborating on the opinion here, here, and here.
The opinion is notable not just for its potential influence and the number of lawyers it impacts but because it is the first opinion weighing in on Avvo Legal Services that explicitly ties together the rating service that Avvo provides and has long provided with the Avvo Legal Services platform that has more recently come to pass.
In doing so, the New York opinion went ahead and analyzed the Rule 7.2(a) question assuming that Avvo’s lawyer ratings were bona fide ratings. It made the point that, if they were not, then other issues would arise regarding lawyer participation with Avvo and lawyer touting of ratings issued by Avvo but went ahead and assumed they were bona fide.
I want to spend just a moment to tackle that assumption and offer my own opinion on the subject. Are Avvo’s lawyer ratings bona fide? No. Of course they are not bona fide. They are not bona fide because your only hope of having a high rating is to work with them and cooperate with them.
My basis for having this opinion is not solely about on my own experience. But, an examination of my own rating with Avvo is an admittedly good place to start explaining my opinion.
I have never “claimed” my Avvo profile nor contributed any information to Avvo to assist in building the profile they have put together on their own for me. (Interestingly, a few times after I have written posts here about problems with Avvo Legal Services I have gotten multiple, repeated calls from Avvo trying to assist me in improving/completing my profile and offering how to claim my profile.) When you go search me up on Avvo you will see that they have afforded me a 6.7 rating out of 10.
Now, admittedly all lawyers are egotistical and none of us are truly capable of objectively evaluating are own worth, but … You can probably say many negative things about me but I don’t think you can say I’m a 6.7 out of 10 when it comes to being a lawyer.
I’ve been listed in Best Lawyers in America every year since 2009. In 2017, Best Lawyers listed me as its Appellate Lawyer of the Year in Memphis. I’ve been listed as a “Super Lawyer” by Mid South Super Lawyers since 2011 and for two out of three years before that (2008 & 2010) I was listed by that publication as a “Rising Star.” I have been AV rated by Martindale Hubbell since at least as early as 2010. (It’s rating of me is 4.7 on a scale of 5).
All of that information is readily, publicly available and could be gathered and evaluated by Avvo without any input from me and without any need for me to confirm or claim my profile. But I haven’t claimed my profile and, they’ve pegged me as a 6.7 out of 10.
Just to make clear that my opinion on this isn’t solely based on my own personal experience/situation. Let me offer a few more examples that are impossible to reconcile with the concept of Avvo offering a bona fide rating system.
Christine P. Richards, the General Counsel of FedEx – she gets an even lower rating than I do, at 6.5.
Also getting a 6.5, Bill Freivogel the conflicts-guru in the ethics world behind Freivogel on Conflicts. Barbara Gillers a fantastic lawyer with a prominent law firm in New York and who is the incoming Chair of the ABA Standing Committee on Ethics and Professional Responsibility also gets the same 6.7 rating I do.
Or, how about Abbe Lowell the prominent D.C. lawyer who is now representing Jared Kushner. He gets a 6.6. Or, here’s a fun one, the lawyer heading up the special counsel investigation into the President, Robert Mueller? He too is just a 6.5.
But Avvo’s own general counsel, Josh King? Well, Avvo gives him a 10 rating.
Dan Lear, an attorney who also works for Avvo, he gets a 9.2 rating.
Oh, I can tell you one that they have gotten correct though, Roy D. Simon, who happens to be a member of the NYSBA committee that issued this most recent ethics opinion also gets a 10 rating from Avvo.
(N.B. While I have no misgivings about my level of readership or influence, on the off chance any of these ratings gets changed subsequent to this post, the ratings indicated above have been confirmed as of today’s date and print outs of the pages are on-file with yours truly.)
4 replies on “Does Avvo provide a bona fide lawyer rating?”
Brian, the question of whether a rating is “bona fide” turns on whether that rating is based on factors relevant to an attorney’s qualifications or competence. If it is, it’s bona fide and an attorney can tout it.
Your objection seems to be that because Avvo doesn’t have as much information about some attorneys, none of its ratings can be bona fide. That can’t be right; after all, where’s the test for “enough information” that a rating becomes bona fide? Are Best Lawyers, SuperLawyers, and Martindale similarly not bona fide because they only do peer reviews of those who have been nominated?
The RPC references to “bona fide” ratings relate to the risk that consumers will be mislead by pay-to-play or made-up ratings. That determination is a narrow one, made as it must be in accordance with the commercial speech doctrine. An attorney advertising their Avvo Rating easily meets that test, as the Avvo Rating is based entirely on factors in that attorney’s professional background. The fact that other attorneys might have lower ratings than you think they deserve is wholly irrelevant to that inquiry.
Josh King
Chief Legal Officer
Avvo, Inc.
Josh,
I appreciate you leaving the comment and the feedback, but you aren’t quite correctly stating the nature of my objection. My objection isn’t that Avvo doesn’t have as much information about some attorneys – it is that the decision to post ratings about lawyers who aren’t interested in participating or providing you with information actually isn’t at all consistent, in my opinion, with being the kind of “bona fide” rating system you’d like to claim it to be. If Avvo only assigned numerical ratings to those who claim and participate, and limited itself to the “no concern” or “concern” approach to others, I would readily agree that it was a bona fide system in the way the rules contemplate. I know that Avvo claims its choice to post ratings of lawyers who get to 6.5 or better without participating is supposedly to help consumers. I don’t buy that explanation at all. I think that does a disservice not only to those lawyers but to consumers of legal services who end up not knowing they are comparing apples and oranges.
We chose to publish ratings for 6.5+ unclaimed lawyers because it provided a better experience for consumers than seeing practice area results pages filled with “No Concern” profiles. But as lawyer participation has grown, and attorney reviews have proliferated, this concern has largely gone away. So earlier this month we made a change, and most unclaimed lawyer profiles are now rated either “No Concern” or “Attention” (the latter for those with underlying Avvo Ratings below a 5).
[…] may recall, a while back, that I kvetched a bit here about my belief that Avvo’s rating system was less than a bona fide system. The primary […]