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Avvo Providing Legal Services

February 10, 2016

Avvo is no longer limiting itself to lawyer rankings and reviews. On his LawSites blog, Bob Ambrogi reports that Avvo is rolling out a service called Avvo Legal Services that offers fixed-fee, limited-scope legal services determined by Avvo and fulfilled by local attorneys. The consumer pays the flat fee upfront, selects a lawyer and Avvo puts the two together. The lawyer performs what's required and Avvo deposits the earned fee(s) into the attorney's bank account. Avvo then withdraws a marketing fee, presumably as a way to avoid a situation constituting fee sharing. The marketing fee seems to land somewhere in the 15%-35% range of the service fee with 25%-35% being the norm. That's a pretty good profit margin for Avvo.

I'll let the ethicists opine as to the fee sharing issue, but I would caution participating attorneys to still track their time to determine if the service makes sense for them or if they're working for less than minimum wage, especially since Avvo sets the fixed fees and the marketing fee. From the consumer side, I would say buyer beware. Most of the services have a statement similar to "But if something unexpected happens and your case requires additional work, you can talk to the attorney about hiring them for extra work." How would a consumer know if there is a potential for extra work and what recourse is there since they pay for something before receiving it?

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