I Made the Cut for Alltop!

In case you haven’t noticed the new “badge” over in the left hand column (likely because you read the RSS feed), my humble blog has been added to the “Law” Category on Alltop, a website that collects “stories from “all the top” sites on the web and aggregates them to a single page. They call this “single-page aggregation.” The founders of Alltop, Will Mayall, Kathryn Henkens, Guy Kawasaki want you to think of Alltop as “a “dashboard,” “table of contents,” or even a “digital magazine rack” of the Internet.”

I’m honored to be listed among the heavyweights of the ADR blog community, such as, Mediation Channel, World Directory of ADR Blogs, Settle It Now Negotiation Blog , Mediator blah…blah…, Conflict Zen, Engaging Conflicts, and Idealawg; as well as some of the best law blogs out there, such as Overlawyered, The WSJ Law Blog, and Above the Law.

Thanks to Alltop for letting us crash the party.

Legal Antics

If you want some good legal humor (or humouuuur for Geoff), head over to Legal Antics.

Apologies to the IE users out there.

I understand that the blog columns are currently a little askew if you are using IE.  My web people are looking into fixing it as quickly as possible.

Interesting Insight Into the Mind of the Plaintiff’s Bar.

Scanning Geoff Sharp’s blog (Thanks. Again.), I found a link to an interesting and short article discussing the valuation of personal injury cases. Being a former defense lawyer, I was a little skeptical about any site written by the dreaded “Trial Lawyers” a/k/a plaintiff’s lawyers. Surfing around the site, however, I found several other interesting articles and comments on a variety of topics, from “What Should Trial Lawyers Wear” to practical help with discovery requests.

It may take some time to separate the wheat from the chaff, but it might be a useful resource for the plaintiff’s lawyer and defense lawyer/insurance adjuster alike. Before you defense types say, “But its for trial lawyers“, remember your Sun Tzu, “If you know the adversary and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles.”

As for mediators, especially those who focus on ADR full time, it helps to stay abreast of the most current trial techniques and legal issues.

LinkedIn – My Space for business people?

Maybe I’m late to this game, but yesterday I was invited to become “connected” to a colleague via LinkedIn. For the other uninitiated, its a networking site. You invite your work colleagues, associates and friends, and then they invite their work colleagues, associates and friends, and like that old shampoo commercial, they’ll tell two friends, and so on and so on . . . All of a sudden, you have tens of thousands of potential contacts! It has a global reach as well – Geoff Sharp is in the network.

It seems like a great idea – until you realize that you can’t directly contact most of the people on the site unless you “upgrade” to a better membership. To the tune of $20/month. I’m going to give it a whirl and see if I can build a list of colleagues. So, if you receive an email from LinkedIn with my email address in the body, its legit. Don’t dump it into your spam folder!

More on the Power of Apology

While I was surfing around this morning trying to determine whether I could become certified as a mediator in Florida, I came across the blog of Perry Itkin, a Florida Supreme Court certified mediation trainer. His most recent post also discusses the use of apologies and references an excellent article in the June 2007 issue of The Washington Lawyer entitled, “The Art and Power of the Apology.” The article dovetails nicely with our Mediation Road Warrior Mr. Smith’s observations on the benefit of an apology discussed earlier.  Please check out both Mr. Itkin’s blog and the article on The Washington Lawyer website.

A great blog for mediators – mediator blah…blah…

I wanted to take the opportunity to mention a great blog I’ve been reading since I started this process myself, mediator blah…blah…. Geoff Sharp is one of the pioneers of the mediation blogosphere and his blog is full of excellent practice (or “practise” as they say in New Zealand) advice and interesting anecdotes. I wanted to thank him for mentioning my modest little blog and recommending to his readers my Lessons from a Mediation Road Warrior series.

Geoff has a lot of useful and interesting stuff on his blog, including a post about scanR, a great tool that allows you to photograph a white board or a document and turn it into a PDF. Please check him out.

More on the Avvo Controversy.

I guess it is true that there is no such thing as bad publicity. It seems that just about every legal blogger is talking about Avvo and Avvo continues to get tens of thousands of hits. But the fact remains that the site, and its basic premise is flawed. Scott Greenfield of Simple Justice hits the nail on the head when he says

But the root of the problem is the number. I may never have tried a case, but if I got involved in all the bureaucratic nonsense of bar associations, made a few friends and wrote an article, I would still get a perfect 10. Paul’s answer is the Avvo does not promote the blind use of the rating number, but says that the rating is just the first step in the consumer’s search for a lawyer. There’s a link to the 3 things to do to select a lawyer. You probably missed the link, as did I. Will anybody read this stuff or just stop at the rating number? What do you think?

Avvo seems to be responsive to the criticism of the legal community, but does not appear willing to move away from its numerical ranking system.

Just wait until someone starts doing this for doctors. . .

An interesting blog about dark underbelly of the adversarial system.

One of the reasons I decided to leave my litigation practice and become a mediator was that I became fed up with what I perceived as abuse of the system. For example, clients who had nary a leg to stand on taking tenuous legal positions and damning the consequences with a “I’d rather pay my lawyers” attitude. Or, the ridiculous battle over the $54 million pants.

Most people are not aware how often such cases are brought, and only hear about it when the parties make an effort to get press exposure, or there’s a slow news day. Overlawyered explores this dark underbelly of the law, and discusses

an American legal system that too often turns litigation into a weapon against guilty and innocent alike, erodes individual responsibility, rewards sharp practice, enriches its participants at the public’s expense, and resists even modest efforts at reform and accountability.

Check it out.

The Avvo Rankings Controversy

In case you haven’t heard, a new internet site, Avvo claims to rate and profile lawyers using an objective “algorithm” that incorporates “information including experience practicing law, disciplinary sanctions, professional achievements, and client ratings.” Lawyers are already up in arms about this and some have filed a class action suit against Avvo, alleging that the ratings are “unreliable and meaningless, misleading to a consumer trying to find a lawyer.”

I’m not sure whether I loathe the idea of an Avvo.com as much as say, this gal, but I was going to jump on the dogpile this morning. Until I read this. Apparently, the owners of Avvo have realized some of the shortcomings of their rankings system and have acted accordingly. The key change they have made relates to the numerical rankings. Mark Britton, CEO writes,

we [will] apply a numerical Avvo Rating to a lawyer’s profile only when, in addition to having the lawyer’s licensing records, either we have collected information from the lawyer’s website or the lawyer has claimed his or her Avvo profile. Where we have only a lawyer’s licensing records, we will display an Avvo Rating for the lawyer of either “Attention” or “No Concern.”

They are also addressing one problem I noted while looking up some friends. Some lawyers are licensed in more than one state. Some have practiced for a number of years in one juridiction, but only a few years in another. This leads to duplicate profiles with oddly disparate rankings. Britton writes,

If a lawyer has more than one profile due to being licensed in more than one state (like me), he or she will soon be able to merge those profiles together into one.

These changes still don’t address the fundamental problem of the site – creating “objective” rankings from subjective data. I can understand the frustration many people face when trying to find a good lawyer. Most consumers have absolutely no idea how to go about choosing an attorney. I’ve gotten calls from people who needed a DUI lawyer or a will drafted and claimed to have simply pulled my name off the State Bar website. But ranking people based on the number of years of practice and whether they’ve been disciplined seems short-sighted.

If I were a consumer, I’d sure like to know that my lawyer didn’t graduate law school last May and that she had never been disciplined by the bar, but how do you rate the skills that make a good lawyer good – the ability to zealously and effectively represent a client’s interests?

Avvo claims to look at factors such as “experience practicing law, disciplinary sanctions, professional achievements, and client ratings.” Does the mere fact that you’ve been a member of the bar for 20 years make you a better lawyer? Of course not. You may not have even practiced law for that entire time. I will grant you that whether a lawyer has disciplinary sanctions against him is important to know, but when were those sanctions? Bankruptcy leaves your credit report after a certain period and you can’t be impeached in federal court by evidence of a criminal conviction over 10 years old. And what about those “professional achievements”? Doing pro bono work might make you a better person in the eyes of many, but does it make you a better lawyer?

Avvo just started, and clearly recognizes that it has a ways to go before it can truly live up to its claims, but is it really serving the interests of the public? For now, I’d say no, and take their rankings with a grain of salt.