And it isn't terribly difficult to determine what the inputs are.
I am ranked at 8.1 (only having been licensed for two years) which is higher than all but one of the attorneys practicing in the same field as me at my firm (ranging between 25 and 6 years of practice). After reviewing all of our AVVO pages, it appears my rating is boosted significantly because AVVO discovered I received two CALI awards in law school. Anyone in the business knows these awards are more or less meaningless in practice (especially since the two I got have nothing to do with my practice area), but they appear to have a significant impact on my score.
Based on our informal analysis, it looks like you start with a baseline of around 5, get a boost of about 1 for every award they found for you, and reduced a ton if you have any bar disciplinary actions pending.
I played around with it by updating my profile with organizational memberships and even got endorsed by an attorney friend of mine and it had no impact on the score. The key seems to be how much the AVVO system can find on you on its own, without you updating it. So more important than what the inputs are may be determining where AVVO is farming its data from.
Overall, it seems to be that the criticism the ranking system is receiving is pretty valid.
Ah but the pesky rules of evidence won't allow for such an inference. Assuming of course that the jurisdiction in question follows the Federal Rules of Evidence (which most do). Rule 407 specifically disallows evidence of subsequent remedial measures to be used as evidence to prove negligence (reasonable person stuff blah blah), culpable conduct, etc etc. Granted you can use this sort of thing to show anything other than negligence, but if this is what his case is resting on then it won't last long since he hasn't shown they are negligent...but then again I didn't read the case so I don't know what else he was offering.
The proposed Section 514(b)(1)(B) seems like the more interesting portion which apparently disallows the corporation from causing an economic loss to any person other than the file trader. The definition of "file trader" doesn't seem to include the ISP which could potentially claim economic loss for their bandwidth consumption.
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And it isn't terribly difficult to determine what the inputs are. I am ranked at 8.1 (only having been licensed for two years) which is higher than all but one of the attorneys practicing in the same field as me at my firm (ranging between 25 and 6 years of practice). After reviewing all of our AVVO pages, it appears my rating is boosted significantly because AVVO discovered I received two CALI awards in law school. Anyone in the business knows these awards are more or less meaningless in practice (especially since the two I got have nothing to do with my practice area), but they appear to have a significant impact on my score. Based on our informal analysis, it looks like you start with a baseline of around 5, get a boost of about 1 for every award they found for you, and reduced a ton if you have any bar disciplinary actions pending. I played around with it by updating my profile with organizational memberships and even got endorsed by an attorney friend of mine and it had no impact on the score. The key seems to be how much the AVVO system can find on you on its own, without you updating it. So more important than what the inputs are may be determining where AVVO is farming its data from. Overall, it seems to be that the criticism the ranking system is receiving is pretty valid.
Ah but the pesky rules of evidence won't allow for such an inference. Assuming of course that the jurisdiction in question follows the Federal Rules of Evidence (which most do). Rule 407 specifically disallows evidence of subsequent remedial measures to be used as evidence to prove negligence (reasonable person stuff blah blah), culpable conduct, etc etc. Granted you can use this sort of thing to show anything other than negligence, but if this is what his case is resting on then it won't last long since he hasn't shown they are negligent...but then again I didn't read the case so I don't know what else he was offering.
The proposed Section 514(b)(1)(B) seems like the more interesting portion which apparently disallows the corporation from causing an economic loss to any person other than the file trader. The definition of "file trader" doesn't seem to include the ISP which could potentially claim economic loss for their bandwidth consumption.