No Good Deed Goes Unpunished
Pity poor Mark Britton. He thought he had a pretty good idea and would help the public out as well. His idea was a public website where users could find information about attorneys, express their opinions about the attorneys, and even rate the attorneys. The ratings would include information that was publicly available, input from consumers, from the lawyers themselves, and from their peers.
"I thought there should be someplace for people to go and get consumer-friendly advice about choosing a lawyer," said Britton, when I interviewed him recently. "I thought there had to be a better resource than the Yellow Pages."
So Britton created something called Avvo, to meet the need he saw in the market.
Many lawyers however, rather than greeting Avvo as a great marketing opportunity, immediately screamed in outrage. Their main complaint seemed to be a lack of objectivity in the standards of why an attorney was rated highly, or not. In fact, two Washington lawyers filed a class action suit against Avvo in June of last year. The class action complaint was dismissed in December. The key passage in the Court's decision, upheld Avvo's contention that the opinions expressed on the website were protected by the First Amendment:
"Defendants assert that the opinions expressed through the rating system, (i.e., that attorney X is a 3.5 and/or that an attorney with a higher rating is better able to handle a particular case than an attorney with a lower rating), are absolutely protected by the First Amendment and cannot serve as the basis for liability under state law. The Court agrees."




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