Rating site Avvo adds Maryland lawyers to its list

The controversial lawyer-rating site Avvo.com has launched in Maryland, and you're on it.

Avvo purports to rank lawyers without letting them influence their ratings through the purchase of advertisements on the site.

Avvo contains profiles for every attorney in 16 states and the District of Columbia, including, as of last week, Maryland. It gives numerical rankings for about 10 percent of Maryland lawyers.

"What we're doing is replicating the process that an experienced, sophisticated consumer of legal services would go through" to pick a lawyer, said Mark Britton, founder and CEO of Avvo.

Britton, former general counsel to Expedia.com, started Avvo last year. He says the site's name is short for avvocato, the Italian word for lawyer.

Britton said his goal is to give consumers a better option for picking an attorney than leafing through the phone book.

Though the site has listings for every lawyer in a state, it focuses on attorneys who deal directly with the public, such as personal injury and criminal defense practitioners.

Avvo has met with resistance in other states. Within days of the site launching in Washington in 2007, two lawyers brought a class- action suit in federal court, claiming that the rankings were misleading and arbitrary and seeking injunctive relief. A judge dismissed the suit on free speech grounds.

Avvo has also run into difficulties in Illinois and New Jersey, where it has had to petition the states to release attorney licensing information. Avvo won in New Jersey but is still fighting in Illinois.

Layers of information

Britton said when Avvo launches in a new state, it starts by getting public attorney listings, which provide names, work addresses, bar admission dates and disciplinary histories. Over that information, Avvo layers data found on the lawyer's Web site and elsewhere on the Internet.

Lawyers have the option of "claiming" their profiles by giving an e-mail address or credit card number, after which they can, for free, add information about themselves, such as awards or cases they have won. Clients and other lawyers can also write recommendations or reviews.

On the strength of all of that information, Avvo rates lawyers on experience, industry recognition and professional conduct and calculates an overall numerical ranking between 1 and 10. Britton said he could not disclose how much weight Avvo gives each piece of information in determining the rankings because it is proprietary information.

Britton said he does not yet sell lawyer advertising on the site but plans to in the future. Advertising will never influence attorney rankings, he pledged.

Not all attorneys have a number rating. Britton said attorneys for whom Avvo has more information are more likely to be ranked.

Less than 11 percent of the 32,328 people Avvo lists as Maryland attorneys are rated numerically. Of those who do have number ratings, only two are ranked less then 5; both have disciplinary histories.

Details, details...

Lawyers who are not ranked are labeled either "no concern" or "attention." "Attention" means that "there is information in the licensing records that, in our opinion, you should pay attention to, such as a disciplinary action against a lawyer without offsetting positive information," according to the Avvo Web site.

Maryland's top lawyer, Attorney General Douglas F. Gansler, earns an "attention" rating on the strength of his 2003 reprimand from the Court of Appeals for comments he made to reporters about cases when he was Montgomery County state's attorney.

The site does not mention that he is now attorney general.

Gansler was out of town Tuesday and could not be reached for comment, said his spokeswoman, Raquel Guillory. She questioned the value of the site's information, pointing out that two lawyers Avvo suggested as "similar" to Gansler practice in areas of the law that he has never done.

"If they're going to do this, they need to have the most up-to- date and accurate information on the attorneys they're profiling," Guillory said.

Lawyers called about their place in the rankings expressed skepticism about Avvo's rating system.

Richard M. Karceski, a well-known Towson criminal defense lawyer, was not given a numerical ranking on Avvo. He said he suspects that's because does not have a Web site. But, he said, that doesn't explain why his friend and fellow criminal defender Leonard Shapiro, who does have a Web site, didn't earn a ranking.

"There's a perfect example of a person who should be rated in the Baltimore County area and should be given the highest rating, and I don't think there's anyone in this business that would disagree on me," Karceski said.

Britton acknowledged that lawyers without Web sites are less likely to be rated on Avvo. However, he said Avvo can serve as the equivalent of a Web site for lawyers who don't have one.

"Here is a free resource that allows them to claim their profile and update it with as much information as they want, as often as they want," he said.