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Attorney Sues Website Over His Online Rating
An anonymous reader writes "The Seattle Post-Intelligencer is reporting that a local attorney is suing legal startup Avvo over a rating that was algorithmically assigned. The story covers the controversy of computers grading humans. 'Browne, who has participated in a number of high-profile cases in the state, including the defense of arsonist Martin Pang, said in an interview that Avvo is being irresponsible with the ratings and called them a fraud. And he questioned why Supreme Court justices and prominent lawyers score so low. Three other attorneys interviewed by the P-I also expressed doubts about the rating system, while News.com reported that the site "seemed to be riddled with bizarre errors."' Such practices are not new: the New York Times earlier this year reported on Google using algorithms to determine applicant suitability. But what happens when you don't like the result? Can a computer program be considered defamatory?"
If I use a hand-held calculator to get a result, and then publish it and that publication defames someone, I can't blame it on the calculator.
In this case, a computer is just another tool used to calculate something - perhaps a tool that many people don't understand as well as they should - but a tool nonetheless.
You use it, you take responsibility for the results. You don't understand how it works? Hire a consultant. The fact that it is a complex tool does not excuse you if you libel someone.
( NB: The above paragraphs presume that there is indeed libel, a fact not yet proven.)
... if John Henry Browne does sue Avvo's computer ranking program it will make him a bad lawyer and thus the ranking will have been a self fulfilling prophecy.
Parent's Sig: When members of a profession start referring to non-members as 'laymen', it is time to start shooting them.
Shooting whom? The members of the profession or the laymen? If you're going to call for someone's head, you should at least be a little more specific about whose head you want served to you on a silver platter.
There's nothing wrong with computer rankings, but they inputs are very, very important. We shouldn't pretend that they are different somehow from human rankings, since humans still carefully select the inputs.
An example that most here can relate to is the US News and World Report college rankings. It's a whole other topic in itself, but suffice it to say that there is a lot of discussion about their inputs and how it has influenced the way colleges operate. Most colleges try to get many small donations instead of a few big ones, because the rankings weigh number of donors more heavily than total amount donated. They encourage many, many applications from just about anyone because they get ranked based on the number of applications that they reject.
Once people learn what the inputs are, they just game the system.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Is it just me, or does it seem like there are a lot of legal professionals who normally have no problem applying existing law to novel situations but who turn into drooling idiots as soon as a computer program or computer network becomes involved?
Uh....
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switch (person.getSkinColor()) {
Well, if they made it clear to viewers how their ratings are calculated, they should not be responsible for harm done. In that case they would just be stating facts (e.g., rating = this lawyer wins X% of his cases - this lawyer charges %Y percent over the industry average for their type of cases...) But if they don't tell people where the ratings come from, then I wonder: how is writing a shitty algorithm that says defamatory stuff about people any better than just saying defamatory stuff about people. People are responsible for the computer programs that they knowingly use.
A cat can't teach a dog to bark.
I can think of a few reasons why supreme court judges would be legitimately rated low. Support for blatant ex post facto laws; commerce clause inversion; allowing states to take people's property; allowing wiretapping before a warrant is issued (FISA); Allowing congress to blackmail the states by withholding highway (and other) funds; allowing the right to bear arms to be infringed upon; allowing government support of Christianity; outright ignoring the 10th amendment (see earlier reference to blackmail); cowardly and un-statesmanlike refusal to hear critical cases of government malfeasance (like Robert Newdow's); allowing the state to infringe upon the liberties of the citizens (drug war, censorship, marriage, sexuality, unreasonable copyright and patent terms and mechanisms; allowing the feds to step beyond the enumerated powers without requiring a constitutional convention; restricting freedom of speech (free speech zones, censorship, funeral zones, etc.)... that's all just off the top of my head.
Yeah, I could definitely see low supreme court ratings.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
1) Attorney sues website that assigned him a low rating. ...
2) Attorney loses, and his rating goes even lower.
3)
4) Profit!
Ok, 3 and 4 aren't really necessary.
^[:q!
Shooting whom? The members of the profession or the laymen? If you're going to call for someone's head, you should at least be a little more specific about whose head you want served to you on a silver platter.
Those who call lawyers useless aren't being very open minded. Lawyers may be a melamine-free source of protein, but I think my cat would prefer something a bit less bony than the head.
I wonder if the computer program has a way to rate them on flavor?
As an aside, I really doubt that skin colour is going to be expressible as a simple enumeration or integer, so you won't be able to switch on it...
"Little does he know, but there is no 'I' in 'Idiot'!"
....Computer says nooo .
May the Maths Be with you!
It sounds like the rating algorithm isn't very good, but I don't see how this guy can win a suit for defamation. In US law, only false claims of FACT are actionable. If the web site stated that a lawyer had received a reprimand from the bar association when he had not, that would be defamatory. If it said he had cheated a client or bribed a juror and he had not, that would be defamatory. But saying: "This guy is a jackass" or "This guy is a poor lawyer" is not actionable because these are opinions.
I'm not sure what can be made of the use of a poor algorithm. If they disclose the algorithm and say "Here is what we get when we plug in the data we have", so long as the data is accurate and they apply the algorithm correctly, they aren't making any false claims of fact. Ethically, it seems like there should be a penalty if they persist in using an algorithm that demonstrably does not produce output that is reasonably related to what people generally take to be valid measures of lawyer quality and if they deceive people into thinking that it is valid, but I'm not sure how this can be addressed legally. I think you'd have to argue that there is an objective definition of lawyer quality of which the algorithm gives a false view. I don't know if defamation has ever been proven on such a basis.
Let me get this right -- these AVVO folks decided it would be a good idea to base their business model on saying things about attorneys that might not be complimentary?
This is quite possibly the first time anyone thought they could make money by being sued constantly. Anyone who thought that the dot-com bubble used up all of the reservoirs of stupidity may now rest assured that fresh reserves have been discovered.
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
Yeah, because nobody is ever falsely accused of rape and therefore anybody accused but not convicted is a rapist walking the streets...
Please, for the good of Humanity, vote Obama.
Seriously, can an algorithm be biased? YES! Very much so. Imagine if we had an algorithm that rated people on a 100 point scale. If your skin color is white you get 100 points to start with, black people get 0 points. That's biased.
Does that mean the company behind the algorithm is biased? Yeah again. In this case (not necessarily Avvo's case) this algorithm is blatantly biased, trying to rate people on their skin color.
Does this mean it's illegal? Not unless the law has changed. If he wants to litigate then he needs to prove the algorithm is biased (and a few anomalies doesn't mean it's biased, it means it has a flaw) Avvo has to be biased in such a way they are making a profit over the difference. Avvo has to be deliberating trying to damage someone's career for it to even be illegal.
If the algorithm is running correctly and there's no X factor (meaningless stastical values, such as the color of the skin) then there's no crime here. They might not have a perfect algorithm but they arn't claiming it.
If the lawyer in question wanted to fix this correctly, he should bring this to the attention of the site, point out numerous cases of people being graded too harshly and then publicize the data to the public if need be. From the sound of it, there's little to no proof except some lawyers feeling they are being treated unfairly. From the sound of it, that's sour grapes, there's no defamation.
Just because an algorithm is poorly designed it doesn't mean it's crap, errors happen even with great algorithm's first iterations. There's still a burden of proof on the lawyer and I'm not hearing any real proof yet.
We've had to face a similar problem as Avvo with SiteTruth, which rates web sites. The answer seems to have two parts - integrity and transparency. This means looking at information that comes from reliable sources other than the thing being rated, and showing the information from which the ranking is derived.
Avvo is trying to do this. Avvo's information comes partly from external sources, like legal directories and records of disciplinary actions. That's less game-able than traditional web search. And Avvo shows that information, so they have transparency.
Google is slowly coming around to this point of view. Originally, Google rankings were opaque, but now they've put in various "Webmaster Console" features to show some of the information that drives their algorithm.
Google faces the problem that some of their metrics for detecting junk web sites are heuristic, and rely on "security through obscurity". They don't want to say exactly how obscure text can be before it's considered "hidden text", or exactly what they consider a "link farm", or they'll be spammed right up to the allowed limit. So they can't have full transparency. They're inherently limited by the approach of primarily looking at the web site itself, which the site operator can change freely, to rate the site.
Google does look at some external non-Web information, but mostly things like how long a domain has been registered.
Avvo has user ratings of lawyers, which probably aren't that useful. User ratings are most valuable when the universe of raters is much larger than the number of things being rated. So it's good for major movies, where there are tens of new movies and millions of fans, marginal for hotels, and weak for businesses few people have heard of. There aren't enough clients per lawyer to get a statistically valid result, and it's too easy to game when the number of raters is small.
Yep, that'd be close, all right. Perhaps I meant injustices.
That would be the feds marching into California and swooping down on medical marijuana users based on a commerce clause argument that 100% intrastate commerce "could be" or "could have been" interstate commerce, and so the feds claim to have jurisdiction to screw with California law, legislators, and citizens. Which they do not. The ruling and the reasoning is sophist nonsense. The constitution says in sec 8, para 1 through para 3, that The Congress shall have Power To... regulate Commerce... among the several States. That's it. No more than that. It's an enumerated power, and there is no authority implied or specified that allows mucking about with commerce internal to a state. Furthermore, the 10th amendment makes the limit explicit: The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people. So there you have it. They have the authority to regulate intrastate commerce, but not interstate commerce. The court is out of line, and so are the feds.
That observation in no way precludes the fact that there are other ways to build roads, including ways that don't screw with people's properties at all. You can go under them; you can go around them; worst case, you can even go over them, though you certainly ought to pay for that privilege. It is wrong to steal, and it is no less wrong when the government does it.
The idea of "fair compensation" is intellectually bankrupt. If I own a piece of land, and I want to sell it, that is where it can be determined that it has a specific monetary value. The way that is done is that when you offer enough money to satisfy me, I'll let you have it.
If you don't, I won't. But if I own that property and for whatever reason, I do not want to sell it, then you cannot put a value on it that equates to "reasonable compensation." How do you compensate for my ancestors having raised generations there? How do you compensate for the view, or the fishing in my lake? How do you compensate for the fact that my brother died in that house, or that I was married there? Or that I built it by hand? Or that I lost my virginity on the living room couch?
The answer, of course, is that you can't, not that it is fair to use some number a bunch of people I didn't delegate my feelings and associations to invented based on their feelings. I'll tell you how it actually works: force and threat of force. Coercion. There isn't a reasonable step in the entire process.
Sure, I'll point the problem out. It is what we call blackmail, where one party is forced to do something it does not believe is legal, ethical or otherwise proper, by another party that wields a coercive force. I'll point something else out, too: the trust the people put in the government to build and maintain a general infrastructure doesn't include the presumption that said power will be used as a weapon, nor does it include the presumption that the feds won't build roads in some states, while building in others. The collection of taxes is (barely) tolerated with the idea that said collection is done for the common good, not in order to wield a coercive force on the states. The fact that the feds do wield such coercive forces is contrary to article 1, section 8 of the
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.