Companies

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”…

Way back in July and August 2005, I wrote a series of posts here about what I called the aging core of FindLaw. In the first post of the series, I started with this:

“FindLaw’s core is showing its age. Started in 1994 as an index of legal resources on the Internet,

Bonnie Shucha reports at WisBlawg that LexisNexis is now picking up blog content in its Newstex database. The list of included blogs shows a mix of legal, business, political, media, technology and cultural blogs. This blog is not on the list, but my other blog, Media Law, is there.…

Via CyberJournalist.net, I learned that LexisNexis is offering a page of news stories about Hurricane Katrina free to non-subscribers. Says CyberJournalist: “This is a fantastic resource. The site pulls from more than 4,000 U.S. and international news sources.”…

LexisNexis will provide searching and viewing of TV news programs by summer’s end, it announced. It has teamed with Critical Mention, a Web-based TV search and broadcast monitoring service, to provide the feature.

According to the announcement, it will deliver searchable video and print news clips together through its pay-as-you-go research service,…