Technology

Avvo Acquired By Internet Brands: What Should We Expect?

The deal would bring Avvo and Martindale-Hubbell under the same roof, and that could be great news for clients.

By  
on

While we await the blockchain-powered AI robots that presumably will eliminate the need for lawyers forever, most clients still need flesh-and-blood attorneys. It’s a process that confuses and intimidates the average person seeking out legal services who generally doesn’t have their fingers on the pulse of the local legal community until the moment they desperately need to make a significant investment — of trust or money or both — in an attorney.

For the last 11 years, Avvo has offered a lifeline to consumers looking for legal help by providing an easy-to-navigate platform complete with ratings and reviews. Lawyers may quibble over the methodology of those ratings or the quality of those reviews, but on balance, the site serves the public well, providing needed transparency to the process of hiring a lawyer.

A couple weeks ago, Avvo announced that it had been acquired by Internet Brands, a company that owns internet brands and desperately needed to spend more than 30 or 40 seconds on their name. While the financial terms of the deal weren’t disclosed, the announcement did reveal that Avvo would continue as a brand under the direction of its existing leadership team.

It’s a blockbuster deal in the legal industry, but what will it really mean for the industry going forward? The uninitiated may think that Avvo just has a new, deep-pocketed parent, but Internet Brands is no newcomer to the legal space. The company already owns Martindale-Hubbell and Nolo, two platforms that — at the 30,000 ft. level — perform tasks similar to Avvo’s core business providing searchable attorney reviews, as well as Total Attorneys, a lead gen site for lawyers, and Ngage, a live chat product with impressive machine learning potential. In this context, merging Avvo’s services into the Internet Brands collection makes a lot of sense.

Mark Britton, Avvo’s Founder and CEO, explained to me that, despite some broad similarities, the Internet Brands products actually complement Avvo’s offerings:

Internet Brands owns assets across the spectrum, more heavily on the do it yourself end of the spectrum [speaking of Nolo] though they’ve also been layering in attorney marketplace features. Our progression is to try and do it all, from DIY form-based solutions, to bespoke legal services, to Q&A chat services.

While the new entity will try to offer solutions across the spectrum of possible legal services, don’t expect the existing Internet Brands verticals to go away. Britton explained that when it comes to the search environment, it’s key to have different brands because when a consumer has more brands to search, the provider gets “more bites at the search apple,” so to speak. This speaks to the underlying philosophy of the acquisition, according to Britton, to “work together to get the legal consumer the help they’re looking for,” while recognizing that the consumer may have a range of different needs that may not fit with a one-platform-fits-all solution.

Sponsored

As Britton points out:

If you think about the legal profession and lawyers, they’re not innovating at the level they need to serve the consumer. Across-the-board, bar associations and regulators need to be considering entry points to legal services and how to serve those. If they aren’t innovating there, consumers will just type “divorce lawyer manhattan” into Google to get themselves in front of a lot of legal consumers. But [Google] is not thinking through understanding the consumer’s legal need and matching them with a qualified lawyer to get the guidance they deserve. They’re just charging a tax.

Britton’s concern that the power players in the legal industry — SCOTUS, state bars, bar associations — aren’t doing enough to innovate in this area, provides another advantage to the Avvo-Internet Brands deal:

Medical is way ahead in this area — in how hospitals interact and maintain relationships with consumers in new ways. “There’s a brand that I trust associated with this medical need, and I go to that website, I interact with a nurse on call 24/7, and if I need more they can set that up.” This is an example where the consumer bypasses the search environment because they have a relationship. The medical profession is working hard to keep that relationship going. Legal isn’t doing any of that.

But that’s another reason this deal is attractive: tapping into the innovation [Internet Brands] has had in other verticals. Being able to get on the phone and talk to people who’ve solved these issues in, say, medical, is super attractive.

We’re excited about where we can learn.

Sponsored

HeadshotJoe Patrice is an editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news.

Topics

, , , ,