Tennessee Injury Law Center
I was hurt in a car wreck and need to hire a Tennessee personal injury attorney. I came across this thing called AVVO. They have a rating system for lawyers. Should the AVVO rating system have any impact on who I hire as my lawyer?
It should have some influence, but not necessarily in the way that you think.
AVVO is about 2 years old. It claims to have established a brief profile for every lawyer. A lawyer "claims" his or her own profile and adds data. AVVO then establishes a rating for the lawyer based on certain criteria it developed. A lawyer does have to pay to appear on the site, although some lawyers pay to have ads placed on the site. However, the basic placement (like mine, shown here) is free. The lawyers listed to the right of my profile paid to be appear on the page, although they too have a free profile.
I would be very leery of any lawyer who had ten or more years experience and did not have at least a "9" ranking. The rankings are not hard to get. As far as I can tell, it is much easier to get a high ranking on AVVO than it is to get the peer-reviewed rankings from Martindale.
More importantly, a single good ranking should not be be the sole or even a major factor in your decision (although as stated above if the ranking is low it should be a red flag). Here is a list of the factors I think you should consider in making this important decision.