As an addendum to my last post about Avvo, check out the following:

Besides taking an extraordinary amount of time to complete a profile, and besides not being able to cancel an account (i.e., “unclaim” a profile), I’ve discovered another issue with Avvo’s online lawyer rating system.

When a lawyer is in the back-end of the platform, just filling out their profile, the system shows you how complete your profile is.  For example, my profile is 30% complete.  My current ranking is 6.3 out of 10, which according to Avvo is “good.”

So, my “good” rating is to some unknown extent based on my profile being less than 1/3 complete.  I don’t know what my rating would be if I took the time and effort to complete my profile, and I’m not going to tell you how long it took just to complete less than 1/3 of my profile.  However, I’ve yet to see a valid reason to spend the extra hours to complete my profile (which I can’t “unclaim”).

But here’s the real issue:  On an attorney’s “Public Profile” page, the page displayed to the public, Avvo doesn’t show to what extent the profile is completed.  So, a visitor to the site (a prospective client) doesn’t know that my “good” rating, or any attorney’s rating, may be a reflection of a partially or fully completed profile.  Consequently, this leads me to restate my finding that Avvo’s system is defective.

Hopefully, Avvo will update their technology and system and get it right (or close to right–how about 30% right 🙂 ).