This award goes to a technical advance on the internet that's not bankruptcy-specific.
This award goes to AVVO.com
You probably don't know what that is. I didn't until last week.
AVVO is a website that provides consumers of legal services, not just consumers of bankruptcy legal services, with the ability to search for information about lawyers on the internet. It is a lawyer information aggregator, and it takes another step that makes it almost unique.
It rates lawyers based on a proprietary (but pretty obvious) algorithm, and lists lawyers according to their specialty, geography, and also according to their magic ranking number, which is a number between one and ten.
Is AVVO a perfect resource?
Absolutely not!
But it's a free, easy to use resource that lets a consumer look at all the information about a lawyer that he or she has pumped in, and all that the clients of that lawyer have pumped in, and all that AVVO has grabbed from third party sources (AVVO puts a red warning flag on the site of a lawyer who has been sanctioned by the relevant bar association), and endorsements from other lawyers (a variant of the system that Martindale uses to give a lawyer the coveted AV rating).
The numerical ranking system, while interesting, is simply not perfect yet. Some lawyers don't bother plugging in their credentials, which certainly reduces their numerical ranking. Some have a lot of experience in the geographical area, and may therefore get a disproportionate number of endorsements. Or they've been a pain in the neck for all the all the lawyers they ever worked with or against (No, I won't give you a continuance! So what if your wife is in labor! So what if YOU'RE in labor! We go to trial today!) and won't ever get a decent endorsement from another lawyer.
But "not perfect" isn't the same as "not useful".
AVVO give a hypothetical reasonable consumer of legal services, including those contemplating a bankruptcy under either Chapter 7, 12, 13, or 11, to compare and contrast a lot of useful bits of information about lawyers without ever leaving their computer chair or bunny slippers.
And that's got to be a good thing.
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