back to article US lawyer ranking site raises attorney's hackles

Avvo, the brand-new lawyer-ranking upstart run by some top US legal professionals and scholars, has only had its shingle hanging for a few days, and already faces a possible lawsuit over its core ranking practices. John Henry Browne, a Seattle-based criminal law attorney, has told Avvo in a letter that he has retained counsel …

COMMENTS

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  1. James Pickett

    Er...

    What did they expect - that American lawyers would somehow overlook ratings of their own worth? The woodland habits of bears would be harder to predict...

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    The winning side will be

    The lawyers - as like a pack of wolves they will wade in ripping anything apart that threatens them

  3. Ralph B

    Survival of the Vilest

    Obviously the "best" lawyers will be those that sue Avvo most effectively to get the best rating. It's what they do.

  4. DrFix

    Nothing to see here...move along now, or else be sued!

    James, I agree completely. Its bitterly ironic that attorneys will wail and bemoan a lack of honesty, openness, or some such emotional appeal, to point out anothers shortcoming, but THEY are not to have a magnifying glass put to themselves. Why the impudence of it all...! How dare anyone question ME! The cheek!

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Hmm.....

    "Avvo doesn't publish the details on how it distills the information it gathers into a number on a ten-point scale, arguing that it wants to avoid any gaming of the system."

    Clearly they've never heard of a little web page ranking company called Google.

    Seriously, the only factor that makes a lawyer ranking system harder to game than a page ranking system is the immense cost of creating data points (lawyers). Other than that, it's the exact same problem. (Many Google tricks depend on creating vast quantities of extra web pages. I would guess that Avvo is probably immune to this type of tactic.) If there are factors in the algorithm which are easily altered by lawyers or clients, then the system is susceptible to gaming. Keeping the algorithm under wraps would only make such gaming harder to detect.

  6. Pascal Monett Silver badge

    The usual double standards

    Seems to me that any customer satisfaction rating is acceptable if it is honest, so I fail to see why lawyers would be exempt. The only difference, obviously, is that for anyone else, they have to call a lawyer if they don't agree. Here we have lawyers acting in their own interest.

    And we all know how well lawyers defend their own interest, don't we ?

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