Team  

Management

Mark Britton

Mark is the founder, CEO and president of Avvo. Mark is a 17-year lawyer with deep experience in the legal and e-commerce industries. View Mark's Avvo Profile

 

Prior to founding Avvo, Mark was the executive vice president of Worldwide Corporate Affairs of InterActiveCorp Travel (IACT) and Expedia, Inc. In this position, Mark oversaw all finance, strategy, corporate development, legal, human resources and government relations functions for the IACT companies, including Expedia, Hotels.com, Hotwire, Classic Custom Vacations and Interval International.


Before Expedia's acquisition by InterActiveCorp, Mark was Expedia's senior vice president, general counsel and secretary and in this role built Expedia's legal and government relations teams from scratch. Prior to joining Expedia, Mark was an attorney and equity partner-elect of the law firm Preston, Gates & Ellis LLP (now K&L Gates). Mark also has worked as an attorney and clerk for small and medium-sized law firms and served as senior counsel to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.


In 2007, Mark was named one of Seattle’s “Top 25 Innovators” by Seattle Business Magazine.  Mark is also a frequent commentator on financial, legal and other business issues, regularly appearing on programs such as ABC’s Good Morning America, Fox Business’ “America’s Nightly Scoreboard,” CNN Money and Dow Jones MarketWatch.

 
Mark received his law degree from George Washington University. He also holds a degree in Finance from Gonzaga University and has served as an adjunct professor of Finance for Gonzaga in Florence, Italy.

Sendi Widjaja

Sendi Widjaja is the chief technology officer of Avvo. In this role, Sendi oversees all product development, engineering, and IT operations.

 

Prior to joining Avvo, Sendi spent 10 years with Expedia, Inc. and Microsoft Corporation in various development and managerial roles. Most recently, Sendi was the senior director of development managing the development team for Expedia's well-publicized next-generation e-commerce platform. Prior to this, Sendi served as the group manager of Expedia's Hotel Systems Group. In this position, Sendi oversaw all program management, development, and test teams for Expedia's highest revenue channel and also oversaw the highly successful integration of the Expedia and Hotels.com inventory management systems and streamlining of their hotel supplier-facing systems.

 

Sendi holds a degree in Computer Engineering from the University of Washington.

Josh King

Josh King is vice president of business development & general counsel of Avvo. He is responsible for the company's business development, outreach to the legal community, and legal affairs. View Josh's Avvo Profile.

 

Prior to joining Avvo in October 2007, Josh was director of business development for Clearwire, where he acquired new markets that expanded the wireless broadband company's market reach to include tens of millions of potential new customers. Previous to Clearwire, Josh was vice president, corporate development at AT&T Wireless, where he led much of the company's mergers and acquisitions work and was instrumental in the $46 billion sale of the company to Cingular, the largest cash transaction in history.  Josh has also worked as general counsel for Cellular One of San Francisco and as a small-firm litigator.

 

Josh is an advisory board member and regular contributor to Corporate Dealmaker magazine.

 

Josh earned a J.D. from the University of California Hastings College of the Law and a bachelor's degree from the University of Oregon.

 

 

Board of Directors

Rich Barton

In addition to his board directorship at Avvo, Rich is the chairman and chief executive officer of Zillow.com. Before creating Zillow, he founded the online travel site Expedia. Expedia was started within Microsoft in 1994 under Rich's leadership, then spun out of Microsoft in 1999 as a public company. Rich served as the president, chief executive officer, and a director until March 2003. By that time, Expedia had grown to become the largest online seller of travel in the world. Rich also worked from 1991 to 1994 in various product management roles for Microsoft. He is currently a venture partner at Benchmark Capital and on the board of directors of Netflix.

 

Rich holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Industrial Engineering from Stanford University.

Brad Silverberg

Prior to founding Ignition, Brad was a senior vice president at Microsoft, where he served as a member of Microsoft's nine-person executive committee. Responsible for driving all aspects of the Windows businesses, he grew Windows from a $50 million business to a more than $3 billion business. In 1995, for his leadership of Windows 95, Brad was named PC Magazine's "Person of the Year." He led the Internet turnaround at Microsoft and was responsible for Microsoft's Internet platform, including Internet Explorer. In addition, he managed Microsoft's developer and Office divisions before retiring from Microsoft in 1999.

 

Brad holds a Bachelor of Science degree magna cum laude in Computer Science from Brown University, and a Master of Science degree in Computer Science from the University of Toronto.

Lou Andreozzi

Recently named as chief executive officer of Inference Data, an e-discovery software company, Andreozzi was president and CEO of LexisNexis North American Legal Markets, a $1.2 billion information and technology company, from 2000-2005. A veteran leader in the fields of business information and legal technology, Andreozzi also managed the Martindale-Hubbell division of LexisNexis from 1996 to 2000, where he led the migration to the Internet of the legal industry's pre-eminent print lawyer directory. Prior to that, Andreozzi was general counsel of LexisNexis.

 

Lou received his B.A. from Rutgers University and his J.D. from Seton Hall School of Law. He also sits on the Seton Hall School of Law Board of Directors.

 

Mark Britton serves as Chairman of the Board of Directors.

 

Legal Advisory Board

Deborah Rhode

The Ernest W. McFarland Professor of Law at Stanford Law School, Rhode is one of the nation's leading scholars in the field of professional responsibility and a staunch advocate of making the legal profession more accessible to consumers. A regular columnist for the National Law Journal and a prolific author of articles and books on the regulation and reform of the legal profession, she is the founding director of Stanford University's Center on Ethics. Before joining the Stanford Law School faculty in 1979, she was a law clerk to U.S. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall. Her recent publications include "Access to Justice" and "In the Interests of Justice: Reforming the Legal Profession."

 

Deborah received her B.A. from Yale University and her J.D. from Yale Law School.

Robert Hirshon

During Hirshon's term as president of the American Bar Association from August 2001 to August 2002, he focused on making the legal profession more accessible to consumers, particularly those with lower incomes. During his presidency, Hirshon was spokesperson for the world's largest professional association and led the legal profession's response to 9/11 and its assessment of corporate governance issues. He also took part in negotiations with the SEC and Congress, including discussions relating to Sarbanes-Oxley and the USA Patriot Act. Hirshon has 30 years of experience as a practicing attorney representing individuals, corporations and associations. He is currently the Frank G. Millard Professor from Practice at University of Michigan Law School, and from 1988 to 1993 he was an Adjunct Professor of Law at the University of Maine Law School.

 

Bob received his B.A. from the University of Michigan and his J.D. from University of Michigan Law School. He has also received honorary degrees from Suffolk University School of Law, Willamette College of Law and the University of Denver School of Law.

J. Craig Williams

Williams is a partner at Sedgwick Detert Moran & Arnold in Orange County, CA and serves on the Board of Directors of the Orange County Bar Association.  His practice focuses in the areas of complex business litigation with emphasis on environmental, real estate, land-use and computer matters, their respective insurance coverage and related tort issues.  He also handles corporate and commercial matters. 

 

The author of the popular law blog, "May it Please The Court" and recent book "How to Get Sued," Williams is also co-host of the "Lawyer to Lawyer" weekly radio program on Legal Talk Network.  He is an adjunct professor at the University of Iowa School of Law and frequent lecturer at other law schools and CLE programs.  He has won numerous awards for his writing and contributions to the legal profession.  

 

Craig received his B.S. from James Madison University and his J.D. from the University of Iowa.