It's been interesting to see social networking sites evolve across the intertubes. Most of the attention goes to the biggest ones like Youtube, MySpace and Facebook but there's countless niche sites making a go of it. I just discovered one called
Avvo that focuses on lawyers.
Actually it's not clear how much of a "social" networking site it's going to be - it seems to be very focused on providing "rankings" - presumably to assist consumers with making decisions on acquiring legal services. In any event, Avvo has seeded its site with information it pulled from several State Bar databases. Since I've practiced in three jurisdictions: California, District of Columbia and Arizona (although I have since resigned from the Arizona bar: purely for financial reasons when we moved as I didn't foresee returning to the State), Avvo has three entries for me (
DC,
CA and
AZ). I'm not sure what use I'll get out of this site but I went ahead and "claimed" the entries as mine. Avvo promises that in the future I'll be able to merge the entries there into one - that's probably a feature they need to add quickly as I imagine a lot of attorneys nowadays have to practice in multiple jurisdictions.
There's a "ranking" feature there: apparently based on my DC Bar entry I get a 6 out of 10 but I must have done especially good work in Arizona because there I get a 6.3. I can't imagine this ranking system will be worth that much unless Avvo gets a significantly large number of attorneys to update their profiles with more detailed information. Bar records tend to collect negative information (admonishments, disbarments) but I don't think they typically collect positive information. But it's interesting and I think in general, the more
accurate information out there in easy-to-use format is a good thing.
UPDATE: Oh this is rich -
someone is already suing the site over the rankings. But hey it's nice to see
I'm closing in on a Supreme Court justice's ranking:
On Avvo, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg scores a 6.5 ranking, as does New York lawyer David Boies, who represented the U.S. Justice Department in its case against Microsoft, and Al Gore in the disputed results during the 2000 presidential election.
ANOTHER UPDATE: From putting in a few bits of information about myself today, I've apparently raised my DC Bar profile ranking to 6.2. Still not as high as my AZ Bar profile of 6.3 (for which the entry has almost no information in it).
