Companies

The lawyer rating site Avvo unveiled a major redesign of its Web site last night in order to enhance user access to its three main features: Lawyer Search, Answers & Advice and Legal Guides. It also formally launched its Legal Guides, a series of brief overviews of legal topics written by private attorneys or…

As a follow-up to my post Monday, Avvo Expands to Mass., Florida, here is a report from the Boston Herald: Lawyers Caught in Web of Scrutiny.…

Lawyer-rating site Avvo expands this week to Massachusetts and Florida, bringing its coverage to 60 percent of licensed U.S. attorneys and spanning 11 states and the District of Columbia. Launched in June 2007, Avvo’s goal is to serve as a consumer resource by rating and profiling every U.S. lawyer. Initially, I was somewhat skeptical…

A federal judge in Seattle yesterday dismissed the class-action complaint filed by two lawyers against lawyer-rating site Avvo. U.S. District Judge Robert S. Lasnik ruled that the opinions expressed through Avvo’s ratings system are absolutely protected by the First Amendment. Here is the money quote from the opinion:

“Rather than seeing the Avvo ratings

The lawyer rating site Avvo today announced two new features: “Avvo Answers,” a Q&A; forum in which lawyers can answer questions posted by consumers, and “Track Record,” a free option by which lawyers can post and showcase their cases and deals. I have more details in a post today at

With all the attention paid to last month’s launch of the lawyer-ranking site Avvo, it was only a matter of time before copycat sites began to appear. One such site, About My Lawyer, launched Friday, and it is so amateurishly executed that I cannot tell whether it is legitimate or a joke. The…

In today’s edition of the legal-affairs podcast Lawyer2Lawyer, we interview the founders of the controversial lawyer rating site Avvo, President and CEO Mark Britton and VP of Products & Marketing Paul Bloom. The two discuss their reasons for founding the site, their responses to criticisms and their future plans. They…

This week on the legal affairs podcast Lawyer2Lawyer, we speak with attorney John Henry Browne, a lead plaintiff in the lawsuit against the new lawyer rating service Avvo. Also joining us to discuss the legal and professional issues surrounding Avvo are bloggers Denise Howell and Carolyn Elefant.

We invited…

As was announced yesterday, Seattle lawyer Steve W. Berman filed this lawsuit against controversial lawyer-rating site Avvo. Later, Avvo CEO Mark Britton issued a statement in response to the lawsuit. I have not been able to find it online, so here is what he said:

“Avvo.com is designed to give consumers information

Today’s debut of Avvo may have been the most hyped new-product launch the legal field has seen in years. With $14 million in venture capital, a board of directors that includes former LexisNexis CEO Lou Andreozzi, and an advisory board made up of former ABA president Robert Hirshon and Stanford Law professor Deborah Rhode,…

Via Information Week comes this interesting item: A Massachusetts man was sentenced in Florida this week for hacking into the Accurint public-records database owned by LexisNexis. According to the U.S. attorney’s statement, the man will spend a year in prison and must pay restitution of $100,000 to LexisNexis and the Port…

LexisNexis today unveiled a new version of its consumer legal portal lawyers.com. An announcement said the site now has a more robust search engine for conducting searches for attorneys listed in the Martindale-Hubbell database. The new search tools include a “free text” query that allows more flexible searching by keywords, a “pick list”…