Avvo legal services. Avvo Legal Services. |

Venture capitalists have long predicted the “disruptive” potential and massive earnings to be found around online legal services technology. Consumer-facing online legal services providers like Avvo, LegalZoom, and Rocket Lawyer have attracted some of the most impressive venture funding in the legal technology space to date in spite of a number of red flags and roadblocks raised by state courts and bar associations about potential ethics violations posed by such companies.

Avvo's recent announcement that it would be acquired by online media and e-commerce company Internet Brands seems like the next big indication that investors are right. Avvo will now sit alongside online legal brands like Lawyers.com, Nolo and Martindale-Hubbell, as well as nonlegal brands like WebMD, under the Internet Brands umbrella.

Avvo will continue to operate as its own brand and does not anticipate any major leadership changes. The deal has not yet been finalized, and terms of the acquisition were not made public.

Avvo CEO Mark Britton said that Avvo has considered a number of different investors and operating companies over the years, but found some difficulty in finding business partners that had a sense of online business trends within the legal vertical.

“Nothing ever really swayed us from our standalone path until Internet Brands. They are different because they've got a real commitment to legal. They get legal. It's hard to find people, investors, operating companies that get legal, that enjoy legal and are really focused on a mission of helping legal consumers and also helping lawyers,” he said.

Britton pointed specifically to the breadth of Internet Brands' consumer-facing online legal services companies. Some of Internet Brands' legal companies focus on do-it-yourself legal documents, others on business development for attorneys, and others on finding and retaining an attorney.

To date, Avvo's offerings have also spanned that spectrum. The company offers document templates for consumers who want to prepare some of their own filings, short consultation services like Avvo Advisor, all the way up to packaged bespoke legal services across a number of different practice areas.

“Serving consumers across that entire spectrum, while it is a noble endeavor, it's also really hard. You just have such a broad range of consumers with different needs,” Britton said of the company's services thus far.

Britton hopes that the acquisition will help Avvo tap into the expertise of Internet Brands' legal brands. “We're trying to do it all right now. Maybe we would be better off having Nolo driving some of the do-it-yourself stuff, and we incorporate some of their forms on our site,” Britton offered as an example, adding that similar opportunities likely exist for many of Internet Brands' companies in legal.

Those plans have not been formalized yet, but they seem to be in the works. A spokesperson for Internet Brands said the company was “already hard at work with the Avvo management team on future initiatives” but did not disclose any specific plans. Britton hinted that the company is looking to roll out some business development tools for attorneys in the future but did not offer specifics.

There are also places where some of Internet Brands' nonlegal companies may inform Avvo's strategy moving forward. “A lot of what WebMD is trying to solve in medical is what we're trying to solve in legal,” Britton noted.

Some of Avvo's services have sparked controversy at the state level, notably its Avvo Advisor service and other bespoke legal service products, but Britton does not anticipate that the acquisition will change the company's strategy for those services. “In our packaged legal services products, Avvo Advisor, anything we've done that has led to different conversations with state bar associations, those needs will never go away and will continue to evolve,” he said.

For now, Britton said that Avvo's acquisition deal isn't likely to rock the boat in the online legal services market. “It's business as usual right now,” he noted. That may not be true for long, however.

“The deal gives us a level of diversification, which leads to stability. With that stability we can continue to innovate on behalf of consumers and attorneys,” Britton said.