Doug Cornelius .com

I have had mixed things to say about Avvo in the past: Avvo’s Online Ratings For Lawyers Come To Boston and Avvo Revisited – I am a 23% Better Lawyer.

Avvo put together a great list of the Top Legal Blogs.

Rather than using the voodoo used by the ABA, Avvo used the blogs Alexa ranking. Alexa computes traffic rankings by analyzing the Web usage of millions of Alexa Toolbar users and data obtained from other, diverse traffic data sources. The Alexa information may be off because it relies on information from its toolbar users. I wonder how many lawyers have the toolbar installed. (I did not install it until I saw the blog list.) So there are a few oddballs in the list. But there is a great transparency to the list that I have not seen in other legal blog listings.

Sadly KM space does not make the top 100 with an Alexa ranking of only 1,319,459.

Update:
You can certainly argue that Alexa is not a useful tool for measuring traffic and ranking site (as I pointed out). The ranking shows the popularity of these blogs to Alexa users. You can interpret whether this carries over to a different population of lawyers and those in the legal field.

As Brian Leiter argues on his Law School reports blog, even site visitors and page views do not capture the best statistic. He points out that average site visit time should be factored into the number site visits to measure impact.

You also should look at the number of subscribers and incoming links to a site. I have yet to see an effective way to mash this all together in a meaningful way.

In my previous post on Avvo.com I expressed concern about their use of a numerical rating. I feel even worse about it now. Last night after I signed up for the service my rating was a 6.5. Now, a day later my rating has shot up 23% to 8.0.

I guess I became a 23% better attorney today, going from “good” to “excellent.”

Doug Cornelius on Avvo.com.

The controversial Avvo.com has come to Boston (and the rest of Massachusetts). I have heard about the reviews and the law suits filed. It looks like the early rating system had some problems with gathering information and weighting the information that Avvo was able to find. As of April 2, they have added Massachusetts.

Since I am a lawyer in Massachusetts, I figured I would check out my profile: Doug Cornelius on Avvo.
At first, I achieved the “No Concern Rating.” There is a process for claiming your profile. After doing that, I got a 6.2 out of 10. That did not seem very good. So I added some publications, speaking engagements, employment, etc. That got me up to a 6.5.

According to their description of how the ratings work, if you add more information to your profile then your numerical rating should increase. I also jumped into the questions feature of the site and answered a few real estate questions. Answering questions got me a badge of Level 3 Contributor, but did not seem to help my rating.

I am all for public disclosure of information, especially public information like attorney discipline. I find Avvo to be an interesting exercise, but I am still not sure where it fits into my public profile. It certainly has a marketing twist to it. Is it any more useful than this blog on law firm knowledge management or Real Estate Space, my commercial real estate finance blog?

Personally, I find the numerical rating to be distasteful and somewhat random. (Admittedly, I might not take that position if I had a rating of 10, or at least above 9.) The information is clearly more robust than the rather sparse information in Martindale: Doug Cornelius in Martindale.

I will continue to keep an eye on it and see what happens.

The controversial Avvo.com has come to Boston (and the rest of Massachusetts). I have heard about the reviews and the law suits filed. It looks like the early rating system had some problems with gathering information and weighting the information that Avvo was able to find. As of April 2, they have added Massachusetts.

Since I am a lawyer in Massachusetts, I figured I would check out my profile: Doug Cornelius on Avvo.
At first, I achieved the “No Concern Rating.” There is a process for claiming your profile. After doing that, I got a 6.2 out of 10. That did not seem very good. So I added some publications, speaking engagements, employment, etc. That got me up to a 6.5.

According to their description of how the ratings work, if you add more information to your profile then your numerical rating should increase.

So I decided to go on a hunt for the highest rated real estate lawyers in Boston. Michael Leon comes out on top, with Robert Fishman, second and Beth Mitchell in third place. All three have a perfect rating of 10.

I checked out some other prominent lawyers here in in the firm:

• Regina Pisa, No Concern
• Andy Sucoff, No Concern
• Richard Soden, No Concern
• John LeClaire, No Concern
• John Englander, No Concern
• Mark Tully, No Concern
• Gil Menna, No Concern

I could not find anyone else in the firm with a numerical rating and I got a bit bored after seeing the lack of information. As of this morning only 149 lawyers in Boston had a rating above 9. With 2896 having a rating above 1. There is a distinct lack of information and utility in the numerical rating.

Of course, today is just the first day here in Massachusetts. I will have to check back to see what happens.