Legal Research

Wisconsin Law Journal Reviews Lawyer Directories: Avvo & Justia

Jane Pribek of the Wisconsin Law Journal has written a useful article on the lawyer directories, Justia and Avvo.

From the article:

Justia is led by former FindLaw CEO and co-founder Tim Stanley. It's more than just attorney profiles; the company provides free case law, codes, regulations, legal articles and legal blog databases, as well as community resources.

Avvo is more focused. Its stated purposed is to help people navigate the "complex and confusing legal industry." The Web site indicates it caters to "regular people" and states that "many of the resources available today were developed for people who are already legal industry 'insiders.'"

Some additional soundbytes from the article:

• "There are other online attorney databases, such as Lawyers.com from the old standby, Martindale-Hubbell. But Avvo and Justia are free, whereas Lawyers.com is not."
  
• "What differentiates the services the most is that Avvo provides an attorney's disciplinary history, client ratings on a scale of one-to-10 and reviews."
  
• "It took about 15 minutes to complete the Justia profile, and from his perspective, there's been no downside to it."
  
• "The most significant value to Justia is the help it offers with search engine optimization, says [attorney Sean M.] Sweeney."
  
• "But Sweeney says, unequivocally, that his firm's Web site traffic has increased since he completed his Justia and Avvo profiles."
  
• It's the ratings aspect of Avvo that makes it a little dicey"
  
• "[Attorney Perlick-Molinari's] advice, especially if you practice in an area where there's high client dissatisfaction, like criminal defense or family law, is to monitor your Avvo rating and reviews often."

Full post as published by WisBlawg - From the UW Law Library on June 25, 2009 (boomark / email).