The Person Who Most Disrupted Law This Decade
If Avvo had done nothing more than introduce lawyer ratings to consumers, it would have been disruptive. But it did a lot more.
Mark Britton (Photo via Avvo)
I am going to go out on a limb and put forth this proposition: No one individual has been more directly responsible for disrupting the legal industry over the past decade than Mark Britton.
As he exits as CEO of Avvo, he leaves the legal world a different place than it was when he founded the company in 2007. His idea — that lawyers should be rated on a scale of one to 10 to help guide consumers — shocked the legal profession.
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Even I was a skeptic, writing upon Avvo’s launch that no numerical score can calculate the worth of a lawyer. “The problem is that the qualities that make a great lawyer are intangible,” I said then.
Not that lawyer ratings did not already exist. Martindale-Hubbell had its peer-review ratings. But those were little more than collegial backslaps — lawyers reviewing lawyers in pursuit of the coveted AV rating, a rating that meant nothing to most consumers. Until Avvo came along, no one scoured disciplinary records or solicited client reviews.
How did the legal profession respond? With lawsuits, of course. Within days of Avvo’s launch, Seattle class-action attorney Steve Berman filed a lawsuit on behalf of another Seattle attorney, John Henry Browne, calling Avvo a “flat-out scam.”
That lawsuit was dismissed on First Amendment grounds, as were other lawsuits that followed, such as in the 2016 ruling where the judge compared Avvo’s listings to the editorial content in Sports Illustrated.
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Also early on, many scoffed at Avvo’s anomalies. At Avvo’s launch, Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg was given a miserly 6.5 out of 10, while Britton was ranked 8. Justice Ginsburg is no longer ranked, because Avvo later changed its system to rank only lawyers who claim their profiles. Meanwhile, Britton moved up a notch to 9.
Perhaps it says something of how far we’ve come that both Berman and Browne, the lawyers who filed that initial challenge, have since claimed their Avvo profiles. You can’t fight progress.
If Avvo had done nothing more than introduce lawyer ratings to consumers, it would have been disruptive. But it did do more. Quite a bit more.
In 2014, it pushed the envelope of how legal services could be delivered with the launch of Avvo Advisor, a service that provided on-demand legal advice by phone, delivered by an attorney within 15 minutes, for a fixed fee of $39.
A little over a year later, it began to roll out Avvo Legal Services, providing a variety of limited-scope legal services for fixed fees ranging from $39 (for 15-minute advice sessions) to $2,995 (for applying for a family green card). That service is now available in 26 states.
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How did the legal profession respond this time? With ethics rulings in several states saying Avvo’s marketing fee for sending lawyers these cases is an impermissible referral fee.
After Avvo Legal Services, Avvo followed with free legal forms for consumers and businesses. This was, of course, territory already occupied by companies such as LegalZoom and RocketLawyer, but Avvo’s offering had one notable difference — all of its forms were free. At the time, Britton told me he believed the service would actually drive more consumers to seek the help of a lawyer.
As Britton leaves Avvo, a decade after its launch, the company still has its share of detractors within the legal profession. But the shock of its original idea has long since subsided. In fact, I would go so far as to say that Avvo is now an established structure on the legal landscape.
My friend and LexBlog colleague Kevin O’Keefe wrote a post last week recapping Avvo’s accomplishments over the last 11 years. He said much of what I would say if I were to make my own list.
The key point is that the legal world is a different place than it was in 2007. The innovations Avvo introduced (or refined) — consumer-friendly lawyer ratings, fixed-fee services by phone, fixed-fee limited-scope legal services, robust Q&A forums, and libraries of consumer-facing legal articles — are now broadly recognized as useful for consumers and even accepted as standard fare.
Just a month after Avvo’s launch, Britton appeared on the Lawyer2Lawyer podcast I cohost. I asked him whether he had anticipated the backlash he’d received from the legal community. He did, he said, but he added that his principle focus was on consumers and on getting them the information and guidance they needed.
“Even though we knew some lawyers would take issue with what we were doing, our focus in this product was in serving the consumer and on getting them the help that they need.”
It is ironic that so many in the legal profession saw Avvo as bad for consumers and bad for lawyers. I came to know Britton enough over the years that I believe he truly had the best interests of both consumers and lawyers at heart.
He did not do it all alone. Many good people worked at Avvo over the years and were instrumental in its innovations and success. But Britton came up with the concept and drove it to where it is today. I cannot think of another individual during the last decade who so changed the landscape of how lawyers and consumers interact — I would argue, for the better.
Robert Ambrogi is a Massachusetts lawyer and journalist who has been covering legal technology and the web for more than 20 years, primarily through his blog LawSites.com. Former editor-in-chief of several legal newspapers, he is a fellow of the College of Law Practice Management and an inaugural Fastcase 50 honoree. He can be reached by email at [email protected], and you can follow him on Twitter (@BobAmbrogi).
