Ride the Lightning

AVVO’s Mark Britton on Why He Started, Sold and Left AVVO

October 3, 2018

I had to compress the title of Bob Ambrogi's LawNext September 24^th podcast a little: The full title is" AVVO Founder Mark Britton on Why He Started The Company, Why He Sold It, and Why He Left." I always enjoy Bob's podcasts, but this one especially interested me. As a former Virginia State Bar president, I remain very active in the Bar and have served on several committees which took a long, hard look at AVVO.

The 50 minute podcast is certainly worth your time if you are involved in the studying the future of law practice, the impact of ethical rules on that future, etc.

After AVVO launched in 2007, a lot of bars began to study AVVO. There was a fair amount of concern about the rating system, which seemed to us to reward those who interacted with AVVO. There were all kinds of way to game the AVVO ratings and they became a popular topic on Google searches as AVVO's popularity increased. While Mark says that the company went after those who tried to game the system, I never saw any serious evidence of that. Attorneys bragged about how easy it was to get a "10" rating on AVVO. And we had recent news that AVVO has settled a New York probe, agreeing that it will no longer call its ratings "unbiased."

So the rating system bothered me a lot since it was so gamified. There was also a lot of talk about AVVO serving access to justice needs, something which is near and dear to my heart. But I never thought that was at the core of AVVO. It is a for-profit company – money was always the bottom line objective. I don't object to that . . . but I often thought that AVVO used access to justice as window dressing. In the course of the interview, Mark says, "the bread and butter business of AVVO was always the advertising business." That speaks for itself.

And then AVVO Legal Services came along, with AVVO determining a flat fee for legal services, holding the monies and disbursing them at the conclusion of the matter to the attorney and then extracting a 'marketing' fee. A number of states concluded that this violated the ethical prohibition against fee sharing.

Mark says it became obvious that there was a huge latent legal market not being served. Of those making $84,000 and up, half were not using lawyers. That was apparently the true target market financially, those who would be enticed by getting legal services at a low cost and would (hopefully) remain with the AVVO attorney and providing more substantial client fees in the future without AVVO involvement. While all that is good, it doesn't target those who are truly in dire need of legal help and often in dire straits financially.

Mark is not particularly enamored of legal regulators, understandably, saying, "the legal profession cuts off its nose to spite its face" and "The Bars were not being innovative, I feel they were being lazy – they had a lot of members complaining and they were just going to say no." It was a lot more substantive than that. Bars were bound to have members angry no matter which way they came down on the AVVO issues – and therefore we were cautious and deliberative.

Ethical rules are very important but they are too complex according to Mark – and I agree with that. Hence the changes Virginia made in its marketing rules, which fundamentally prohibits misleading or deceptive advertising.

Mark wasn't surprised that Internet Brands, which bought AVVO earlier this year, shut down AVVO Legal Services. As he said, all of the state opinions started coming out and the finish line seemed farther and farther away. I don't wonder that Mark was exhausted and ready to move on in life – or that his greatest regret is that AVVO Legal Services didn't succeed.

While Mark refers to state regulators as too fat and happy and not interested in consumers, I disagree. Virginia, along with a number of other states, is working on developing new ethical rules that would permit attorney client matching services, but avoiding the ethical pitfalls of the AVVO model.

So in the end, I agree with Bob that AVVO moved the legal world forward – whether we agreed with you not, you pushed the envelope and that pushed everybody a few steps forward. That's a good thing for all of us.

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