Lawyer ratings site not without objections
A venture-capital backed Web site called Avvo.com that launches Tuesday claims to offer a "game-changing" alternative to the Yellow Pages for anyone interested in hiring a lawyer. — Avvo's plan is ambitious: to award a numeric score …
Context & Ripple Effects
On launch day, venture-backed Avvo.com is positioning itself as a 'game-changing' alternative to the Yellow Pages for anyone hiring a lawyer — the twist being a numeric score awarded to every attorney rather than paid, self-authored listings. The model borrows the consumer-review playbook that was then remaking restaurant and travel search, but aims it at a credentialed profession for the first time at this scale.
The friction arrived immediately: the site faces confirmed objections over its plan to score lawyers numerically, meaning Avvo is launching not just against the Yellow Pages but against the profession it rates.
First-order effects
- Lawyers wake up scored: every attorney listed gets a public number they did not pay for and cannot edit, flipping the Yellow Pages model where the professional controls the listing.
- Avvo's free, score-driven directory puts it in direct competition for the lawyer-advertising budgets that have flowed to print Yellow Pages publishers.
Second-order effects
- Objections from rated lawyers push the dispute toward legal-regulatory channels — state bars and courts become the arbiter of whether a private company may publish professional scores, setting precedent either way.
- If lawyer-search proves monetizable by score rather than by sold placement, other vertical directories built on purchased listings face pressure to add editorial ratings they don't control.
Third-order effects
- The deeper shift is that professional reputation moves from something practitioners purchase to something computed about them — a structure in which professions must litigate or adapt rather than opt out.
- A working template here would travel: any credentialed field (medicine, finance, contracting) becomes a candidate for the same score-first, ad-second directory economics.
The trend: Consumer-review platforms are extending algorithmic scoring from restaurants and hotels into credentialed professions, with each profession's objections defining how far the model can reach.