"Despite the cherubim, Plaintiff's restaurant received a 'Decor Rating' of only 19 out of a possible 30."
Here's a delightful commentary on some of Avvo.com's own selling points put together by my talented friend MDL:
- It's unbiased. Because scores are calculated using a mathematical model, all lawyers are judged by the same standards. The Avvo Rating takes into account many factors, including experience, professional achievements, and disciplinary sanctions. IT DOES NOT, HOWEVER, TAKE INTO ACCOUNT ACTUAL PROFESSIONAL COMPETENCE. HEY, WHAT DO YOU WANT FROM A MATHEMATICAL FORMULA ANYWAY? MEANINGFUL, QUALITATIVE EVALUATIONS OF A LAWYER'S COMPETENCE? HOW 2006!
- There's no favoritism. Here at Avvo, all lawyers are treated equally. They can't pay to change their scores, and we don't play favorites to lawyers we know. WE ONLY PLAY FAVORITES TO LAWYERS WHO REGISTER THEIR CREDIT CARD # WITH US, THUS ALLOWING THEM TO PAD THEIR PERSONAL BIOGRAPHY AND UNLOCK THE ABILITY TO SEND FRIENDLY REVIEWS TO THEIR DATABASE. It's just the facts, so to speak.
- It's developed by legal experts for non-experts. The model used to calculate the Avvo Rating was developed with input from hundreds of attorneys, thousands of consumers, and legal experts. WE LARGELY IGNORED THE INPUT OF THE ATTORNEYS, HOWEVER, AS WE FOUND IT ANTITHETICAL TO OUR BUSINESS MODEL.
- It's easy to understand. With a simple ten-point rating scale and the ability to sort by Avvo Rating, we hope to make the murky process of comparing lawyers clearer – MUCH LIKE THE PROCESS OF CHOOSING A MATE.
The basis of the claim is that Avvo.com is violating the Washington Consumer Protection Act, whose provision declaring unlawful "unfair or deceptive acts in the conduct of commerce" is the only thing standing between me and a very profitable paper siding business. Presumably there is caselaw interpreting this very broad language in some sensible manner (although it is never a good idea to assume that Washington has any caselaw apposite to any question that interests you). I note that I have just used the word "apposite" for the second time today! That's just the kind of guy I am. But we were talking about the lawsuit. You would think that a system that tried to distill something so complex as a lawyer's skill down to a number from 1 to 10 would present difficulties and limitations so obvious that any reasonable consumer would recognize that they existed even if he couldn't identify them specifically. I don't have to know the difference between BTU and MPG to know that a "Car Rating Index" of 6.5 has got to be leaving a lot out of the equation.
So, anyway, I think the class action is idiotic. It's no different from suing Zagat. It's also worth noting that there is no business relationship of any kind between Avvo.com—a free site—and the consumers supposedly being protected by the Washington statute. Perhaps someone needs to sue Google on behalf of everyone whose site didn't come up on the first page of results despite being the most apposite to the search query. Yes, that's three. I rule.
I think Avvo.com illustrates once more a central problem of this age of democratized information. You take the human expert—with his unfair information advantage—out of the equation, a form of information anarchy develops and then all sorts of clever people try to come up with simulacra of or proxies for the human experts who are no longer present. The theory often seems to be that if you tweak the chaos just right, or provide the right incentives, out will come order. Does the Second Law of Thermodynamics apply to information? I doubt whether Wikipedia has a trustworthy answer.
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posted at 1:42 PM
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