I have written previously about finding a bankruptcy lawyer by triangulating with three different websites: Martindale.com, Findlaw.com, and AVVO.com. And because I wrote it, I think that was a good post!
All three are directories where you can track the wild lawyer to his or her lair.
All are easy to find on the Internet, because all of them get a lotta hits every day from people looking to find a bankruptcy lawyer, or a divorce lawyer, or a litigator, or a probate attorney.
Why would I suggest that people use an online directory to find a lawyer? Well, you can't all hire me! A lot of my readers are in jurisdictions where I don't practice law.
Heck, a lot of my bankruptcy blog readers are in India! I never fully understood that, but I love my readers, wherever they may be.
But I want folks to find the best attorney possible to file and prosecute their bankruptcy cases, whether that will be in Arizona or in Minnesota (which is, to me, an exotic location indeed).
So how to find a bankruptcy lawyer when you're stressed, anxious, and crunched for time? But when finding the right lawyer is actually a bet-the-farm kind of exercise?
Well, I like AVVO.com a lot. And even more now than when I wrote my prior post about finding a lawyer by triangulation.
For many, many years, Martindale was the only game in town when you were a sophisticated user of legal services and didn't want to get fired by the COO or CEO at your company for hiring the wrong lawyer.
It probably still is the best tool for avoiding getting fired for hiring the wrong lawyer, actually. Because CEOs are used to hearing the line, "Boss, the guy had a Martindale AV rating! What more could I have done?"
But for ordinary folks, and even extraordinary folks who are looking for lawyers, AVVO.com is the new eight-hundred pound gorilla of lawyer directories.
It's simply a better mousetrap for everybody in the picture.
For lawyers who want to list their information online, it's My Favorite Price!
For consumers of legal services, it's My Favorite Price!
But frankly, if you could pay money as a consumer to make sure that the lawyer you were about to hire was the right lawyer, you couldn't do much better than AVVO, in my humble opinion.
For one thing, your time has value. And if you have to spend an hour figuring out how to navigate a difficult website, that's bad. And if you can't tell the difference between guys on a website who show up high in the rankings because they paid for the privilege, that's bad.
Now, you can pay to advertise on AVVO, and because it's a fairly new service, AVVO rates are competitive. I use 'em myself. But it's very clear which lawyers paid to be listed first on the page in a category, and which lawyers show up high because of their AVVO ranking.
That's a good thing.
AVVO tries to post a listing for every single lawyer in practice, to the extent that it can; I don't know how quickly it lists baby lawyers when they get their ticket to practice, but that's a quibble. And for all I know, maybe AVVO missed a lawyer who lives in the swamp somewhere; as far as I can tell, everybody is at the party.
Some lawyers have chosen to populate their profile on AVVO with information so that prospective clients can make informed decisions. Some lawyers can't be bothered.
Fine either way, right?
And AVVO is currently in the top three online directories for lawyers (I said that because I think it's number one, but I don't have time to check the statistics). So a lawyer who hasn't filled in his info on AVVO clearly doesn't care whether you know anything about her. Or him. Or them.
You get it.
Let's get back to "your time has value".
When you search for a lawyer on AVVO, you can do broad-based geographical searches at the click of a button. You can tighten the noose until you're looking only for lawyers in Phoenix, Arizona, or Glendale.
You can then sort further, looking for lawyers who have client reviews. And you can read those client reviews, right?
That's actually a big deal, because lawyers may say nice things about themselves, and lawyers may say nice things about other lawyers, but if a client can say anything she wants about a lawyer, well, the lawyer had better work to make all their clients as happy as possible.
Note that it's inevitable that all lawyers will eventually get clients who hate them, or their services, so searching reviews is exactly like searching reviews on Amazon. After all, there are even people who don't like the Invicta Automatic Watch, water-resistant to deeper in the ocean than the wearer!
You can also tell whether AVVO has tracked down any indication that the lawyer you found has been the subject of any bar discipline, which shows up as a big red electronic flag.
You can also search by the AVVO lawyer rating, which is a numerical score given to lawyers by a computer algorithm, whatever that is.
But whatever a computer algorithm is, my guess is that it's hard to bribe, and it can't be bought (based on statements made by the folks who run AVVO; I didn't try. Really.), and you can sort for lawyers who give free initial interviews, lawyers who have been endorsed by other lawyers, and lawyers who have been reviewed by clients.
So here's what you can take away from this rant: if you are in a jurisdiction where I am not, so you can't hire me.
If you are an extraordinary person with remarkable legal needs, or an ordinary Joe or Jane with ordinary needs, you want to know what your lawyer can do for you, what their education and bar background are, what they have in the way of certifications, honors and awards, and you want to know what their prior clients thought about them.
You can find all that, and more, on AVVO.com.
For My Favorite Price!
p.s. it's blindingly fast and easy to use.
p.p.s. I forgot the downside. Oh, yeah. As far I as I can tell at this point, it doesn't have one. I'll come back to this post and rework it if I find a fatal flaw in this lawyer directory, but so far, I haven't found anything that wasn't well put together when they designed the program.
p.p.p.s. I just figured out what's wrong with AVVO. It doesn't list doctors and rate them, and let their clients rate them. That would be a very useful service, if it were done exactly the same way.
But since AVVO wasn't designed to rate doctors, I can't downgrade my rating of AVVO very much for that.
Some. Just not very much!
p.p.p.p.s. I noticed recently that not all lawyers love AVVO.com, although I don't understand why. Apparently all clients looking for information about lawyers do love AVVO.com, although if a client sues AVVO.com for something or another, I'll be happy to tell you about it as soon as I see it. Up until now, all lawyers suing AVVO that I know about have had their cases booted out the door of the Courthouse, but you never know what will happen in any Court.
On the other hand, if the lawyer who recently sued AVVO.com had not sued AVVO, everybody in the United States and India wouldn't currently be reading about why AVVO posted a little red flag on his profile.
I have no clue whether there's a lesson here for lawyers.
p.s. AVVO.com now lists doctors, too! Woo-hoo!
All three are directories where you can track the wild lawyer to his or her lair.
All are easy to find on the Internet, because all of them get a lotta hits every day from people looking to find a bankruptcy lawyer, or a divorce lawyer, or a litigator, or a probate attorney.
Why would I suggest that people use an online directory to find a lawyer? Well, you can't all hire me! A lot of my readers are in jurisdictions where I don't practice law.
Heck, a lot of my bankruptcy blog readers are in India! I never fully understood that, but I love my readers, wherever they may be.
But I want folks to find the best attorney possible to file and prosecute their bankruptcy cases, whether that will be in Arizona or in Minnesota (which is, to me, an exotic location indeed).
So how to find a bankruptcy lawyer when you're stressed, anxious, and crunched for time? But when finding the right lawyer is actually a bet-the-farm kind of exercise?
Well, I like AVVO.com a lot. And even more now than when I wrote my prior post about finding a lawyer by triangulation.
For many, many years, Martindale was the only game in town when you were a sophisticated user of legal services and didn't want to get fired by the COO or CEO at your company for hiring the wrong lawyer.
It probably still is the best tool for avoiding getting fired for hiring the wrong lawyer, actually. Because CEOs are used to hearing the line, "Boss, the guy had a Martindale AV rating! What more could I have done?"
But for ordinary folks, and even extraordinary folks who are looking for lawyers, AVVO.com is the new eight-hundred pound gorilla of lawyer directories.
It's simply a better mousetrap for everybody in the picture.
For lawyers who want to list their information online, it's My Favorite Price!
For consumers of legal services, it's My Favorite Price!
But frankly, if you could pay money as a consumer to make sure that the lawyer you were about to hire was the right lawyer, you couldn't do much better than AVVO, in my humble opinion.
For one thing, your time has value. And if you have to spend an hour figuring out how to navigate a difficult website, that's bad. And if you can't tell the difference between guys on a website who show up high in the rankings because they paid for the privilege, that's bad.
Now, you can pay to advertise on AVVO, and because it's a fairly new service, AVVO rates are competitive. I use 'em myself. But it's very clear which lawyers paid to be listed first on the page in a category, and which lawyers show up high because of their AVVO ranking.
That's a good thing.
AVVO tries to post a listing for every single lawyer in practice, to the extent that it can; I don't know how quickly it lists baby lawyers when they get their ticket to practice, but that's a quibble. And for all I know, maybe AVVO missed a lawyer who lives in the swamp somewhere; as far as I can tell, everybody is at the party.
Some lawyers have chosen to populate their profile on AVVO with information so that prospective clients can make informed decisions. Some lawyers can't be bothered.
Fine either way, right?
And AVVO is currently in the top three online directories for lawyers (I said that because I think it's number one, but I don't have time to check the statistics). So a lawyer who hasn't filled in his info on AVVO clearly doesn't care whether you know anything about her. Or him. Or them.
You get it.
Let's get back to "your time has value".
When you search for a lawyer on AVVO, you can do broad-based geographical searches at the click of a button. You can tighten the noose until you're looking only for lawyers in Phoenix, Arizona, or Glendale.
You can then sort further, looking for lawyers who have client reviews. And you can read those client reviews, right?
That's actually a big deal, because lawyers may say nice things about themselves, and lawyers may say nice things about other lawyers, but if a client can say anything she wants about a lawyer, well, the lawyer had better work to make all their clients as happy as possible.
Note that it's inevitable that all lawyers will eventually get clients who hate them, or their services, so searching reviews is exactly like searching reviews on Amazon. After all, there are even people who don't like the Invicta Automatic Watch, water-resistant to deeper in the ocean than the wearer!
You can also tell whether AVVO has tracked down any indication that the lawyer you found has been the subject of any bar discipline, which shows up as a big red electronic flag.
You can also search by the AVVO lawyer rating, which is a numerical score given to lawyers by a computer algorithm, whatever that is.
But whatever a computer algorithm is, my guess is that it's hard to bribe, and it can't be bought (based on statements made by the folks who run AVVO; I didn't try. Really.), and you can sort for lawyers who give free initial interviews, lawyers who have been endorsed by other lawyers, and lawyers who have been reviewed by clients.
So here's what you can take away from this rant: if you are in a jurisdiction where I am not, so you can't hire me.
If you are an extraordinary person with remarkable legal needs, or an ordinary Joe or Jane with ordinary needs, you want to know what your lawyer can do for you, what their education and bar background are, what they have in the way of certifications, honors and awards, and you want to know what their prior clients thought about them.
You can find all that, and more, on AVVO.com.
For My Favorite Price!
p.s. it's blindingly fast and easy to use.
p.p.s. I forgot the downside. Oh, yeah. As far I as I can tell at this point, it doesn't have one. I'll come back to this post and rework it if I find a fatal flaw in this lawyer directory, but so far, I haven't found anything that wasn't well put together when they designed the program.
p.p.p.s. I just figured out what's wrong with AVVO. It doesn't list doctors and rate them, and let their clients rate them. That would be a very useful service, if it were done exactly the same way.
But since AVVO wasn't designed to rate doctors, I can't downgrade my rating of AVVO very much for that.
Some. Just not very much!
p.p.p.p.s. I noticed recently that not all lawyers love AVVO.com, although I don't understand why. Apparently all clients looking for information about lawyers do love AVVO.com, although if a client sues AVVO.com for something or another, I'll be happy to tell you about it as soon as I see it. Up until now, all lawyers suing AVVO that I know about have had their cases booted out the door of the Courthouse, but you never know what will happen in any Court.
On the other hand, if the lawyer who recently sued AVVO.com had not sued AVVO, everybody in the United States and India wouldn't currently be reading about why AVVO posted a little red flag on his profile.
I have no clue whether there's a lesson here for lawyers.
p.s. AVVO.com now lists doctors, too! Woo-hoo!
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