AVVO WATCH has for its sole and exclusive purpose the task of educating the legal profession about Avvo.com and similar social networking websites which comment on and influence the legal profession.
WE INVITE YOUR ATTENTION to our creative agenda: ~ A discussion of Avvo.com and its founder,
Mark Britton. We expose Avvo.com for the lawyer bashing web site that it is!
Mark Britton is getting rich trafficking in human pain. Mark Britton's web site is rewarding cruelty and
degrading nobility. Mr. Wolfstone expresses the opinion that Avvo.com is a House of Desolation.
Avvo.com is
one of those disasters that passes at first as an embarrassment and eventually manifests itself as a
badly leaking nuclear reactor whose core is out of reach.
Mark Britton is a middle aged man with modest experience as a lawyer who has never devoted his career to
bar leadership, and yet Mark Britton has appointed himself a one man super bar association for the purpose
of ranking and rating every doctor and lawyer in America. Mark Britton's own Avvo page confers an Avvo score of 9.2 out of 10 on himself with inflated praise and self-promotion ~ so that the reader is tempted to ask whether
Mark Britton is a greek god or just another narcissistic personality. There would be nothing wrong with
grade inflation if Mr. Britton would be honest enough to admit that he has boosted his own pedigree and
conferred an inflated score on himslef as a "fringe benefit" of his position at Avvo.com. Instead, Mark Britton
expects his readers to believe that his score is an achievement that he has earned. Au contraire! Mark Britton's self-conferred rating is Mark Britton's sub rosa gift to Mark Britton. Thus, Avvo.com's rating system is not only a negative inadequacy but also a positive evil. Quite frankly, Avvo.com draws members of the public to its web site with a sleazy parade of damaged and injured lawyers. Avvo.com is a system that clever lawyers can easily
game and manipulate, although Avvo.com denies that lawyers can game the system. Avvo.com prefers to perpetuate the
fiction that lawyers are awarded higher ratings based purely on an objective and impartial rating system driven by
computer software. In my opinion, Mark Britton and his Team Avvo are misrepresenting the truth ~ It is a game and the game is fixed!
Mark Britton claims that his Avvo.com web site enables him to "shine his flashlight" into dark places, but
Mr. Britton needs to shine his flashlight in his own face and stand in front of a mirror.
Avvo.com and Mark Britton also make the patently untrue
claim that his web site offers "free legal advice" and reassures the members of the public "we have you
covered." On closer examination, it is clear that Avvo.com only offers a black letter law exposition of
general legal principles which is not tailor made to a specific client with a specific legal problem
who needs a specific course of action based on a lawyer's careful probing of the facts and based on
a lawyer's skill to make careful distinctions between and among cases. However, the joke is on the
members of the consuming public who accept Mark Britton at face value when he states that he is
offering "free legal advice" because the punchline is buried in a long-winded footnote which says
"legal information" ~ which includes said free legal advice ~ is not intended to be legal advice!
Mr. Britton's deceitfulness is enough to give the reader an attack of vertigo.
Mark Britton is also guilty of mining data from the Washington D.C. Bar Association web site without permission and contrary to the explicit policy and prohibition of the Washington D.C. Bar. Mr. Britton apparently relies upon the familiar shibboleth that the "public has a right to know" to justify his unauthorized intrusion. Problematically, however, Mr. Britton and the other licensed lawyers on his Team Avvo never learned in their legal education that the First Amendment does not give them a roving commission to steal from other people. Quite frankly, Mark Britton needs laboriously to rediscover the meaning of honesty through the obscured envelope of his misguided education.
For Mark Britton and for his Team Avvo, the Truth is a set of movable blocks that Mark Britton can shift around ~ forwards, backwards, and sideways ~ to create whatever counterfeit reality pleases them on the Avvo.com web site. For Mark Britton and his Team Avvo, the American Bar Association's Rules of Professional Conduct track their every whim and caprice.
Mr. Wolfstone concludes, "I would not hire Mark Britton to
push a broom."
