Small Law Firms

Avvo Announces The End Of Its Legal Services Program While Pointing Out What They Really Think About Lawyers

Which group does Avvo think matters more, potential clients or lawyers?

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It has been an interesting 2018 for Avvo, a company that is either a friend or a sworn enemy to lawyers. In January, Avvo was acquired by Internet Brands, a company that also owns Martindale-Nolo Legal Marketing Network.

As reported by Reponsive Law, the new management decided to drop Avvo Legal Services at the end of this month. Internet Brands and Avvo wrote a joint letter announcing this decision to the North Carolina State Bar. It is speculated that this decision was made due to the potential fights with numerous state bar associations who think this service might violate professional ethics rules.

Avvo Legal Services allows a potential client to pay Avvo $39.95 to speak with a lawyer participating in the program. The attorney and the client would be connected through the Avvo website and would then speak for at least 15 minutes about the client’s issues.

Personally, I didn’t have a problem with Avvo Legal Services. It was a convenient way to connect an attorney with a potential client. Since I last wrote about this some time ago, I have heard from lawyers who participated in this service. In most cases, the attorney would discuss the client’s options generally and advise them to follow up with an attorney. At $40 per session, the client probably does not expect the lawyer to provide an answer that will magically make their problems go away.

I think some adjustments could have been made to the service. My biggest problem with the service was that the attorney could not set the consultation fee. I did not like the way that Avvo charges a single, universal flat fee for consultations. Also, their other services — such as document review and form preparation — were in my opinion underpriced. But more on this later.

As I continued to read Internet Brands’s and Avvo’s joint letter, I noticed a sentence that I found particularly interesting:

At Internet Brands, we are focused on our users and making sure that we provide them with accurate, and consumer friendly information to help them navigate the difficult task of identifying and hiring lawyers.

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Did you catch that? For Internet Brands and Avvo, they consider their “users” to be potential clients looking for lawyers. So even though they make money from both lawyers and nonlawyers, they intend to cater primarily to the nonlawyers. This does not necessarily mean Avvo is against lawyers’ interests. After all, they need lawyers just as much as they need customers to make money.

What this means is that if they have to make a business decision that favors one group over another, they are going to choose potential clients over lawyers. Perhaps they think they can make more money from potential clients and not from the lawyers paying for their advertising services. Earlier, I mentioned that Avvo’s prices for fixed services were severely low. How did they come up with those prices? Did they ask a random group of nonlawyers what they thought a fair price was? I doubt they consulted with practicing attorneys.

There seems to be signs that the new management will want lawyers to pay up. According to Keith Lee of Associate’s Mind, a member of his Lawyersmack listserv was told by an Avvo representative that the company is planning to remove all contact information for lawyers who do not subscribe to Avvo’s paid advertisement services. But this might not be much of a threat since there are many lawyers who want nothing to do with Avvo or its controversial rating system.

We’ll see what Avvo’s new overlords have in mind for the company. But the signs indicate that they are more interested in improving client experience and helping practicing lawyers improve their business will come a close second. You may want to remember this when you are thinking about paying their monthly advertising fees or planning to go to their annual Lawyernomics conference. But for this strategy to work, they have to make the company so influential that practicing lawyers cannot afford to ignore them.

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Shannon Achimalbe was a former solo practitioner for five years before deciding to sell out and get back on the corporate ladder. Shannon can be reached by email at sachimalbe@excite.com and via Twitter: @ShanonAchimalbe.

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