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• Achtung, Declan Baby!!
  Snarking aside, Avvo's goal seems to be to provide a great service, and providing great service isn't easy. The problem might be in the promotion, but the idea itself has been tried in a lot of different ways without success. There's no harm in trying it again.
  
  Avvo is attempting to avoid some of the errors of other sites, most of whom are the stepchildren of seriously deep pocketed legal information providers who didn't devote the energy and resources to development of comprehensive resources.
  
  The big players already have huge databases on lawyers, but none has come up with a reasonable presentation of that information for the average consumer. Public information is only really useful when aggregated and interpreted, so let's see how Avvo does before slamming them too hard.
  
  Consumers are used to tuning out Google ads by now,--at least until they need something, so the model is tired, but not yet dead. Eventually everyone will move on to another income-producing model, but until then, going with the flow ain't so bad. Anyway, which came first,-- the TV show or the commercial? Was U2's first album their best? I've been a U2 fan for 25 years and personally have clocked the most hours on Achtung Baby. Yet, one doesn't get to one without the other.
  
  I blog about "Law 2.0" services from the perspective of the intersection between law and technology ("Mullen on Law 2.0") and from that vantage point, I see some neat things coming. Avvo is using Ajax in interesting and helpful ways, the user interface is very-user friendly and I suspect the back end is supported by the latest programming innovations as well.
  
  As a lawyer, OF COURSE, I have misgivings, but I think that a little pain in the industry is long overdue. Law is a service industry and to argue that it doesn't already have ratings is simply not correct. I'd love to see a poll of lawyers asking whether they have a clue about the foundation for Martindale Hubbell's ratings. At the end of the day, consumers need to be given as many tools to sort out their legal issues as possible. Nolo offers a great service, let's give Avvo a chance to do the same in a different way.
  
  Do I care about my Avvo rating? No, but then again, I don't know what it is. And, I probably won't look (once they get Michigan up and running), so that I can stay as objective as possible. There's great blogging material there, so my personal experience there as a lawyer shouldn't matter.
  
  The problem is that ratings in the legal world are generally tools used to exclude, not include. Every lawyer has faced the stress of knowing that GPA and LSAT scores mean almost nothing on the street and that "Ivy League" is a term used to strangle the careers of aspiring corporate lawyers who attend non-Ivy schools. Lawyers love special clubs, and so one more ratings system is hardly going to break the bank. My hope is that sites like Avvo will encourage all lawyers to not just think outside of the box, but to build tools that encourage competence in our clients.

  June 6, 2007

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• Limited access prisoner sites are vital to legal representation
  Prisoners are the most highly isolated population in the United States. Yet, they are the ones in most need of competent legal services, and services related to their rights under the Constitution. Innocence projects, pro bono legal service providers and other attorneys survive in large part due to their access to the internet.
  The Prison Services Project exists to assist prisoners find competent legal services, and we intend to publish prisoner websites under the following conditions:
  
  1. The primary purpose of the website is to request assistance from lawyers, it is not a pen pal or dating service.
  2. The prisoner does not own the website, it is owned and published by the Prison Services Project (www.prisonservicesproject.com).
  3. The prisoner does not have direct access to the website and does not control editorial decisions.
  4. The public does not have direct access to the website, lawyers and legal service providers must register.
  5. Prisoner names and detailed case descriptions are not accessible outside of the password protected-domain.
  6. Every effort is made to preserve attorney-client confidence.
  
  With these precautions in mind, we do not expect ANY governmental interference with our business, --which is to protect the rights of prisoners and their families to obtain legal assistance. While it is a fair compromise to limit or deny interactive access to the internet, it does not follow that prisoner web sites should be censored any more than any other website. It is a clear violation of the First and Eigth Amendments to deny prisoners, their attorneys, or legal service providers the right to publish, or request publication of, legal websites.

  August 18, 2004

  0 replies