Avvo

Non-Sequiturs: 02.21.13

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* A study finds that over 93 percent of attorneys, judges, and legal writing professors think the writing they’re reading is bad. One could argue this is evidence of a crisis in writing skills. Or one could argue that lawyers are a**holes who think every voice other than their own is wrong. It’s a 50/50 shot. [Associates Mind]

* If you ever wondered how many OSHA violations one could find with Jabba’s Palace, wonder no more. [Legal Geeks]

* Are you scared of Obamacare? Here’s a roundup of your official survival guides! [The New Republic]

* If you’re trying to enter the United States, border agents can seize your electronics and look at all your private files because you need to respect their authoritah! [Forbes]

* Joseph Kennedy Jr. died helping to invent drones. OMG, you guys! The drone war is the final stage of the Kennedy family’s long-term liberal plan for world domination. [io9]

* Senator Menendez has hired McDermott Will & Emery and Perkins Coie to conduct spin control now that he’s getting flak for privately funded air travel and hooker allegations. See what you can do with your law degree! [The BLT: The Blog of the Legal Times]

* Avvo is expanding their legal rating service into a full research tool to allow potential clients to pick out lawyers. So you’d better get in good with Avvo now. [Avvo]

* Now here’s a trick — watch Magic Circle lawyers disappear! Pepper Hamilton, now led by Louis Freeh, lures Linklaters lawyers to its ranks. [Thompson Reuters News & Insight]

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Morning Docket: 11.29.12

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* Enjoy your Biglaw bonuses now, because according to managing partners, layoffs and de-equitizations may soon be making their return. Oh, only in Pennsylvania? Woohoo, break out the bubbly! Just kidding, that really sucks if it’s true. [Legal Intelligencer]

* The Environmental Protection Agency has temporarily banned BP from entering into future U.S. government contracts because of the company’s “lack of business integrity,” aka the Deepwater Horizon explosion. Ouch, super sick burn, EPA! [National Law Journal]

* Considering going to law school? Then you should also take into consideration the fact that you’ll have to become a lawyer if you want to stand a remote chance of ever being able to pay off your loans. [Fox Business]

* Paul Ceglia pleaded not guilty to fraud charges yesterday in federal court. If only he actually owned half of Facebook as he claims, he probably wouldn’t have a court-appointed attorney representing him. [Bloomberg]

* “No matter how many high-priced lawyers and publicists she employs, she has been exposed for what she is.” Jill Kelley’s lawyer is on the offensive, and his targets are none too pleased about it. [Associated Press]

* Avvo has decided to sell its health business to focus entirely on providing services to lawyers and legal customers. Now the company will be able to do the law justice. (SWIDT?) [Puget Sound Business Journal]

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Non-Sequiturs: 11.13.12

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Proven security, but maybe not from murder charges.

* Okay, okay, I’ll upgrade my McAfee virus protection, just please don’t kill me. [Fox News]

* Elmo likes to talk dirty? [TMZ]

* Progress would involve getting cops to stop beating people up just for fun. [Simple Justice]

* James Dolan, already one of the worst owners in professional sports, is now sticking to the letter of the Cablevision contract and requiring customers to call in to tell them when Sandy knocked out their service if they want a refund. [Gawker]

* The Electric Chair movie sounds horrifying, but so does the death penalty. [Underdog]

* Check out Avvo Ignite, an exciting new client conversion and website solution for attorneys. [Avvo Ignite via Law Technology News]

* Check me out on this podcast and hear my passionate and slightly drunken defense of David Petraeus. I do not think that there is an epidemic of generals being blackmailed over their affairs. [Recess Appointments]

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Is Uber Against The Law?

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If you don’t live on one of the coasts, you probably don’t know what Uber is.

If you do live on one of the coasts, but don’t know what Uber is, you are probably a poor who takes the subway everywhere and “walks” or something.

But if you do know what Uber is… it’s freaking awesome, isn’t it?

For the uninitiated, Uber is a smartphone app that allows you to call for a prepaid car to your immediate location. If this sounds like it’s not a big deal, then you’ve never tried to get a cab to get you the hell out of Brooklyn at 3:00 a.m. on a Saturday night.

I was first introduced to Uber by Mark Britton, the founder and CEO of Avvo. After meeting him for drinks, I was locked in the black-person hell of not being able to hail a cab and wondering if it was because of race, but trying not to look like I was wondering that in front of a white person. While I’m contemplating hurling an IED at the next on-duty cabbie who doesn’t stop, Britton calmly pulls out his phone and explains that with Uber, a livery cab will be sent to our location in minutes. We’ll be able to track our car with GPS and the whole thing is automatically paid for, including tip, through the phone.

Oh brave new world with such applications in it.

Now, Uber is trying to move from livery cars to yellow taxi cabs. It should be great, if not for all the pesky legal issues….

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Lawsuit of the Day: Why is This Guy So Angry with Avvo?

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Ed. note: This post is by “The Gobbler,” one of the two writers under consideration to join Morning Dockette as a Morning Docket writer. As always, we welcome your thoughts in the comments.

Lawyers tend to define their careers by numbers (school rank, class rank, firm rank) – at least when the numbers are to their liking. Unfortunately for Larry Joe Davis, he does not have a good number (a 3.7 out of 10). He is angry about it and, like any good American, expressed his anger in the form of a lawsuit. Larry Joe’s rambling 21-page complaint, which he of course filed pro se, makes him the latest of several plaintiffs to take a shot at Avvo, the Zagat-esque rating website for the legal industry. I haven’t read the other complaints, but I’m still sure his is the worst of the group.

It reads like a Jack Kerouac novel, jumping around and running together, making it harder to follow than a screenplay-style blog post. The two main points seem to be that Avvo has a “routine business practice of publishing false and misleading information regarding attorneys” and that it coerces attorney participation via a “join-us-and-fix-it-or-else strategy” that “approaches actionable blackmail.” In other words, Larry Joe doesn’t like what’s on his profile and can’t figure out how to change it. His Internet ineptitude seems far-fetched at first, but given his statement in the complaint that web searching is a “new field,” maybe he really can’t figure it out.

So what “misleading information” is making Mr. Davis one of the mad ones?

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