avvo — Legal Practice Pro

Fear Of The Bad Review Of Your Legal Services

Small businesses live in fear of a bad rating from Yelp, the kingpin of user review sites. A lackluster rating could kill their business, ending the dream of entrepreneurship. In the world of the law, we’ve got Avvo. And it inspires some of the same fears in the hearts of my colleagues.

Avvo, for those of you who don’t know, is a site where consumers of legal services can rate their lawyers. Those lawyers can seek to increase their ratings by completing their biographical information, answering questions posed by Avvo users, and soliciting endorsements from other lawyers.

But the part that burns many lawyers is the feedback portion. Good feedback is excellent for your reputation, and bad feedback is the end of the world. The lawyer’s solution? Don’t claim a profile on Avvo; in doing so, you prevent the negative feedback.

The problem is that when you don’t claim your profile, you also don’t get the potential benefit of good feedback. You relegate yourself to being invisible on this rapidly-growing platform.

And make no mistake – Avvo is growing by leaps and bounds. According to this chart provided by Compete.com, Avvo garnered over 600,000 unique visitors to the site in December 2009 alone:

So on the one hand you’re petrified of negative reviews, and on the other hand you’re itching to get traction on a high-flying web property. What to do?

Claim the Avvo profile, knowing full well that you’re going to get a bad review once in awhile. If someone is making a concerted attack on your profile, contact Avvo and work with them to get the spammer or troll blocked. But aside from those extreme situations, realize that you’re not going to please all the people all of the time. Some folks just can’t be pleased, and they may use Avvo as a platform for letting the world know their displeasure.

But think about this – when you’re looking for a new product online, do you let a single negative comment dissuade you from making the purchase? If there’s an awesome printer for sale at a perfect price, do you walk away because it’s got a 4.5 rating on Amazon? Of course not.

In fact, the average online rating is a mere 4.3 out of 5.0, according to Bazaarvoice, a company that handles online feedback and monitors customer conversations for a variety of businesses. Think about it – 4.3. On the Avvo rating scale of 0-10, that’s an average of 8.6.

Take a step back for a moment and think about that meal you had in a restaurant last month. Was it good or bad enough to light a fire under your feet to go out and write a review on an online forum or feedback site such as Yelp? Unless you’re a die-hard foodie and were either recipient of the best or worst meal of your life, chances are pretty good that you didn’t do any such thing. You may have mentioned it to a friend, but actually seek out a site to provide a review? Slim chance.

Why not? It took too much time and effort to go to the site and write the review. And that’s the same feeling most people have about just about everything. Too much to do and only so many hours in the day (thank you, Billy Joel).

Now let’s look at the other side of the coin. Ever look for something online and see nothing but glowing 5-star reviews? How did it make you feel? For most people, a little radar goes off in our heads. It doesn’t feel right. In fact, the inclination is for most people to think that the vendor is stacking the deck with feedback from ringers in a ploy called astroturfing. For that reason, a less-than-perfect rating seems more credible to most people and, hence, more likely to be believed.

So what does that mean for your fear of online ratings of your legal services? It means that if you’re inspiring a lot of bad reviews (not from trolls and spammers) then you may want to take a step back and assess whether you’re doing something wrong or could improve your services. But a few bad ones littered in with mostly positive comments about the job you do? It’s part of the territory, and to be expected. It isn’t going to kill your business (it will wound your ego, but you’ll get over that), and may actually give it a boost of credibility.

Getting Your Bankruptcy Practice To GREAT . . . And Leaving GOOD Behind

You can be a good bankruptcy lawyer, filing cases and getting your clients a discharge. Cure the mortgage arrears, save the car, wipe out the unsecured debt – that’s all good. Very good, from your perspective.

But what do your clients think?

Do you ask them? Do you take the time to listen when they tell you?

Can you handle bad news when your clients give it to you?

Some years ago I ran across Jed Berliner, a Massachusetts bankruptcy lawyer with whom I had never spoken. Didn’t know him from a hole in the wall, in fact. But I read an article in the ABA Journal talking about this lawyer who sent out surveys to each of his clients after their case was completed.

Brilliant! I thought to myself. But what would this survey look like? What would it ask for? And would my clients take the time to send it back?

So I got in touch with Jed – now one of my closest friends and an excellent lawyer on many levels. Asked him for the survey. He gave it up willingly.

This was, sadly the first step in a long number of them. For months the file sat on my hard drive unused. I was too busy to do anything with it, didn’t want to waste my time sending it out.

Then one day I had a few hours, and dropped 50 of them in the mail to clients who had finished their bankruptcy cases. Just a test, no expectations. I sent along a self-addressed, stamped envelope for good measure and figured it was a waste of a few bucks and some spare time.

Uh oh. I should have put on my hard hat.

At the time, I’d been practicing for about five years at the time (this was in 2000, mind you) so I was definitely not a newbie. I knew my stuff, practiced ethically, and was well-organized. My staff was friendly, I was thoughtful in my approach to client matters. In sum, I was a good lawyer.

My clients, on the other hand, had other bones to pick with me. A skeleton’s worth, in fact.

I didn’t return calls immediately.

I was often unavailable.

My staff wasn’t as helpful as they could be.

My office hours were inconvenient.

My fees were too high.

The list went on and on. I was so bloody and bruised after reading about a dozen that I had to take a walk around the block. Four times.

I could have dismissed the criticisms as the gripes of crabby clients. I could have kept on keepin’ on. I could have stopped sending the surveys.

I did none of those things. Instead I asked myself what would have resolved those problems and made the clients happy. And over time, I tinkered with my practice and my staffers until those complaints went away. I let clients know when I would be available to take calls, and set down a policy for returning messages. I published those items to my clients and let them know when they met with me for the first time. I changed my sales practices, emphasizing what I would and would not do for them. I added value in a million little ways.

And I still got some bad reviews. So I changed a few more things.

The bad reviews are the ones you want, not the good ones. You need those to make you a GREAT lawyer in the eyes of your clients. You need them so you can constantly ask yourself what you could do better – and to force you to do those things.

Because YOU are not the arbiter of whether you are a great lawyer – your clients are. YOU do not create good buzz about you practice and get friends and family members to refer people to you – your clients do. And YOU do not determine whether a good review of your law firm shows up on Avvo, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, a blog or any other online resource – your clients do.