Comments on: Client-based lawyer ratings

By: E. Anderson

E. Anderson — Sat, 24 Apr 2010 14:16:26 +0000

what can I do about a lawyer in Ontario, is trying so hard and in many dishonest ways to influence a court decision towards his client’s benefit by filing false claims every where against the opponent side for his client, which is me, very un-ethical, so dishonest. Mr. Rosen is trying to discredit me for the benefit of his client.

I find this to be a discrimination against equal rights of justice, by trying to influence the system.

By: The rise of the responsible client

The rise of the responsible client — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 18:27:07 +0000

[...] whether positive or negative, doesn’t have nearly enough weight to be meaningful. I raised the same objection to anonymous client reviews when Avvo debuted a while [...]

By: Talking to ourselves « Law21

Talking to ourselves « Law21 — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 18:10:04 +0000

[...] that gathers its data from lawyers or law firms themselves. The AmLaw 100 does it, too. So does Avvo. So do almost all the legal periodical surveys that rate lawyers in a particular practice area or [...]

By: Paul Bloom

Paul Bloom — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 04:31:17 +0000

Paul Bloom here, a co-founder of Avvo (and, I might add, born and bred in Toronto). I very much enjoyed reading your post — you have some good suggestions about tapping into trusted connections to provide reviews of lawyers.

To give you some insight into our thinking about this feature, when we designed the first iteration of Avvo we considered publishing the name of the individual writing the review. However, through focus groups and discussions with consumers, it became clear that they would only post reviews if given the option of anonymity. In short, they were concerned about getting sued if they wrote something the lawyer didn’t like. We listened, and allow consumers to post reviews anonymously. However, to reduce review SPAM we require the reviewer to register at Avvo and provide us with an email address so that we can contact them. If a lawyer contacts us to question a particular review, we will contact the reviewer to confirm the review; if we don’t hear back from them, we’ll take down the review.

A perfect solution? No. But I think it strikes a reasonably good balance between respecting the needs of the reviewer and those of the reader. Otherwise, we would probably end up with only reviews that are highly positive, which is not as helpful to the consumer (historically, around 80% of reviews submitted to Avvo are positive). That said, we’ll continue to adjust our approach to make the feature better.

Thanks for the coverage of what we’re doing. Hopefully we’ll get to Canada in the not-too-distant future.

Paul