Mirror Post: Avvo’s Impact on Solos

Remember – we’ve moved! Check out the original post at The Inspired Solo’s new home!

I promised a post about Avvo’s impact on solos in my earlier post this week but it looks as if Susan Cartier Liebel’s ably taken care of that perspective in her post on her Build a Solo Practice, LLC blog. So, I’ll refer you to that post.

Susan calls it FICO scoring for lawyers. The analogy isn’t inappropriate. FICO scores have long been the butt of jokes among bankruptcy and debtor/creditor lawyers for their ephemeral nature – the way the underlying formula changes arbitrarily – the way certain aspects of the scoring factors can be read as positive or negative, depending on the scorer, the scoree, the time of day, the phase of the moon …

All true. I’m not so sure I agree with the panicked “join the class actions” call to arms that Susan’s post communicates. But she certainly does raise some good points, especially with regards to new solos:

And new solos, you will get slammed as you try to build your business. You will not have years of practice. You will not have name recognition (as they purport to define). You will not be spending your limited resources on joining every organization out there. You will be ranked at 1 – extreme caution. Who are they to tell your potential clients to ‘use extreme caution.’ Who are they to dictate your marketing efforts and how you spend your start-up money and profits? This is dangerous territory, people, and it is time to slay the dragon while it is young.