Rating Lawyers

So, during the day, I work for LexisNexis… which owns Lawyers.com, the largest lawyer directory online. But before they went online, they pioneered the idea of lawyer ratings. So you can imagine they’re constantly re-considering the ways you can measure “trust”.

As I was looking over a site where you can rate congress, the (somewhat obvious) principle of leveraging user-generated content to complement the trusted AV rating service comes to mind. I know that team is working on great things in that area, but my question to the blog world out there is Would you trust community ratings/comments about lawyers? Is it true that the dissatisfied are far more likely to submit content and thereby skew results? What about shill posters who put up favorable ratings, who could do the same. The idea of expanding into 2.0 is attractive, but more complicated when you look deeply. [see the problems Avvo is running into lately...]