Avvo Endorsement Spam

Mark Bennett did a little sleuthing and exposed a few lawyers who are "endorsing" thousands or lawyers on Avvo. Why?

Why would Lewis endorse 9,080 people—or, more likely, pay some­one to post cookie-cutter endorse­ments? Is it out of the good­ness of his heart? Oh, no. Howard Lewis knows lethal gen­eros­ity. He knows the truth of endorsements—what I tell my friends when they ask for Avvo endorse­ments: it’s bet­ter not to ask for them. If you really want peo­ple to endorse you, endorse them.

The problem, as some of the lawyers begging Bennett for endorsements are just beginning to find out, is that their spammy endorsements (or requests for endorsements from people who don't know them and have no business endorsing them) are fair game, too. Bennett is using endorsements to good effect:

In truth, I don’t know Mr. Cray­tor; never heard of him. But he doesn’t have many typos in his “about me” page, so when he had Avvo send me an email ask­ing me to endorse him, I thought, “what the hell?” Why not endorse this guy who has this mar­ket­ing web­site spam every stranger in his email address book with a request for an endorse­ment? That’s good enough for me. After all, it’s really hard to find a lawyer who offers con­tin­gent fees in crim­i­nal cases. And if I know noth­ing about him, so what? I don’t have to know him to endorse him, amirite? You don’t think the other lawyers endors­ing him know him, do you? Why shouldn’t I bump up his endorse­ment numbers—that’s what unin­formed poten­tial clients are look­ing for (“Oooo, 35 endorse­ments. Shiny!”)—and help a brother out? After all, dear reader, we’re lawyers, and if we want to write endorse­ments that make you think that Bart is our near­est friend, the fact that we’ve nei­ther met him nor seen him work won’t get in our way.

Unfortunately, since you get to control the endorsements that show up on your Avvo profile, I doubt these lawyers are going to leave Bennett's comments up for long. Then again, maybe they won't even notice.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go make sure Bennett didn't "endorse" me. Because I don't know if you know this, but I'm a pretty big deal on Avvo.