Kevin O’Keefe reports that Martindale-Hubbell, the grande dame of lawyer raters, appeared to have given up. Game over. Pack your bags. Time to mop the floor. It’s done.
It’s unclear that MH will stop listing its AV ratings, but apparently the bunch of folks at MH that decide on ratings have been told to seek new opportunity elsewhere. That doesn’t bode well for the rating system as a whole.
What does this mean? Who knows. Way back when, when Martindale-Hubbell was the only game in town and lawyers really didn’t have much access to information about other lawyers from other places, an AV rating provided some level of confidence that the lawyer was respected within his local legal community. Whether well deserved or not, it gave some degree of security that the lawyer wasn’t a total mutt.
Today, things are different. The internet provides a wealth of information about lawyers, and we can gather as much info about a lawyer from Seattle as we can about the lawyer in the next office. Location is irrelevant. Information is everywhere. The old AV rating (and why did they ever pick “V” rather than “+”?) is more of a nostalgia thing than a meaningful indicator of competence, right? Well, not exactly.
For better or worse, we took the Martindale Hubbell peer review ratings seriously. We may have been wrong to do so, but we did. Unlike the fluff of marketing ploys like SuperLawyers, there was a degree of faith in an AV rating that meant something across the boards. We believed it to be real. Maybe we just needed to have something to believe in, but we did.
New players entered the fray in the meantime. Avvo made a big splash with its numerical ratings, but was subject to severe criticism from within the bar for its secret algorithmic methodology that burned younger lawyers and experienced lawyers who couldn’t be bothered to play its game. Then Avvo gave up whatever credibility it might have had by selling paid lawyer advertising on the same page as its putatively consumer-useful informational pages, reducing itself to just another “business model.” And I thought Avvo had such promise.
Perhaps MH lost it’s purpose to Google, since searching a lawyer’s name provides far more information than MH ever could. But aside from information overload, there is no way to determine the accuracy of this wealth of information, or to put it into some succinct useful form. In exchange for volume, we gave up reliability. There’s little way to tell whether our bits of information garnered from searching is the product of meaningful assessment or ignorance, or even hatred and deception. There’s a lot of junk online.
It’s understandable that Martindale-Hubbell, the dinosaur, moved too slowly to adapt to a changing world and was doomed. It’s just not clear that anything better, or even equal, exists or will come into being in the future. Current evidence suggests that it won’t, and that we will be saddled with too many SuperDuperLawyer websites or Avvo-type magic-ratings, but no one in whom the profession can put its trust.
So the Martindale-Hubbell age has past. What are we going to do now?
Update: Martindale-Hubbell has responded to “the rumors” of the death of its ratings, claiming the reports of its demise “have been greatly exagerated.” So what does it mean when you fire all the people who handle the ratings? They say they are “fully committed” to continuing the ratings, plus a whole lot of other new initiatives that will bring “transparency by practice area, narrative feedback and validated data from third parties that provides examples of an attorney’s experience.” What that means is anybody’s guess.
To provide even more focus, we will name a new VP/ Product Champion of Ratings who will help us spread the message about our transformation. We are also increasing the current number of Martindale-Hubbell Specialists in the market in order to educate our firms about all the new offerings, including enhanced ratings services. We are adding a product marketing team for a more consistent flow of information and wider communication and we have expanded the current responsibilities of our inside Ratings Support team.
After careful consideration and a long period of deliberation, this change also included a change in the role and responsibilities of the ratings specialists. While this was a truly difficult decision, it is one that we felt necessary to best meet client needs.
After cutting through the rhetoric, I believe that this means they fired all the ratings people and replaced them with marketing people, who will now spread out across the country to bring us transparency through marketing. After all, there is no better way to “meet client needs” then sell them stuff.
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We should have a community based ranking system. For example, I give you a score of 10. You give me a score of 10.
We both put that on our cards.
The whole thing is silly, really and yet the profession is in sore need of something whereby the consumer is informed of the good and the bad. But with personal services, it’s near impossible to do in a meaningful and co-ordinated manner.
I was going to write a post this morning about the “awards” various blawgs are giving out this time of year, Not so much about the giving, but about how it’s used by some blawgs no one even knows exist to find their way onto the radar because people just love being given an award, no matter who gives it. The awards are utterly meaningless, and the more there are, the bigger the joke. Yet blawgs do their “I want to thank the Academy” speech whenever they get one, even if they have no clue who gave it to them. We just love an award.
We should give each other a rating of 11. Just so we all know how ridiculous this has become. Is there anty source left with any credibility, or is this the wild west now, where each lawyer is gunning to out-puff the next.
Frankly, I’ve never understood the rating systems. Maybe it’s because by the time I became a lawyer, the systems were already in decline. They always just seemed too open to abuse for my tastes.
Plus, now that I’m part of the (dysfunctional) legal community, I don’t see how the ratings could have ever really meant anything except that some group of popular kids thought another kid was cool.
And just as with high school, it seems to me that it’s high time to move on.
The MH AV rating was just a right of passage in the old days. It never really mattered much in criminal defense, since our clients rarely had a set of books available to them at the moment they needed us.
I guess the relevance now is that people have a ton of information available. It’s just that most of it is either nonsense or unreliable. If you want to get a good laugh, check out Avvo and see who’s putting in an effort to make themselves “special”. Now it’s no longer up to the cool kids, but each person by himself can create a personna that may be total sham. How does that help consumers of legal services to know who to select?
I’m celebrating a bit because MH has, without qualification, the most obnoxiously aggressive and entitled marketing people in the business. I once shipped all the free junk one had sent me (pens, pads of paper, etc.) back to him in a box and told him to leave me the hell alone. Another one was so rude about upgrading our listing that we canceled.
Meanwhile, all the calls we got based on our MH listing were from the crazy or the impecunious.
The AV rating is useless for personal injury attorneys where the public opinion means more than the opinion of attorneys.
Same as criminal. I can’t remember a single instance when anyone asked for or knew about my AV rating. Still, it was nice to have since it meant my peers thought well of me.
I have recently posted on Kevin’s site but I would like to add here that it’s interesting knowing that when a couple of people on a multi-person M-H ratings team is let go and sends an inflammatory note to a customer, the social networking community assumes the worst and pontificates about the “death of AV ratings”. Of course, from the inside (I am in Sr Mgmt at M-H) I can assure you that this is far from the truth. This community should understand that efficiencies in old business models must be achieved and if we determine to trim (not eliminate) the ratings team in an effort to move to more efficient-less human – methods of establishing the ratings evaluations that this does not mean the end. In fact, it’s an effort by M-H to try to reinvent and do a better job more efficiently. We are actually expanding our ratings to include not only the AV/BV ratings model but also to include client reviews as well as fact-based data to give “consumers” a more robust set of ratings criteria with witch to make their decision. Unfortunately, this was a bad PR event for M-H but that should not be misconstrued to mean any lessing of the importance of the ratings. Our Corporate Counsel customers tell us that the impartiality and breadth of the M-H reviews one key reason that they trust the M-H system.
So, do we have a lot yet to do – of course. But, have we come a long way? I think so. And the evolution of the ratings is (and has been) an ongoing activity that unfortunately was punctuated by a rogue former employee to a law firm. It would be wrong to read too much into this “news”. Again, we have a long way to go at M-H but are committed to providing useful business development solutions to the legal community. Many other changes will be needed as we move along this path.
best –
Dave Danielson
VP Strategy and Alliances
LexisNexis, Martindale-Hubbell
MH is a dinosaur that has some big challenges to stay relevant to small firms, in particular. For the lawyer who needs to drum up a few grand to pay bills next week, an AV rating is meaningless. It’s one of those things that everyone used to do, but now they’re asking ‘why?’. Every marketing dollar has to be justified and show a clear ROI.
The golden ROI. But how does one show ROI. Read some solid strategies here: [deleted]
[Ed. Note: Even Lexis-Nexis employees trying to salvage the company’s rep are not allowed to include links in comments. You coulda just explained your point, but you got greedy and had to go for the link. Sorry, but you don’t get to advertise here.]
MH ratings are a complete joke. I’ve got 28 years in and no “peers” have reviewed me in decades. My so-called peers are in an office in DC. What I do is so specialized I have maybe, MAYBE, 10 peers in the entire country that understand what I do. I have been thinking of suing MH to remove my rating (BV) because it bears no relationship to what I do. I practice in 8 different federal district courts and handle at most 4 cases a year. Do these raters track down the 4 firms I worked with in a given year somewhere between Phoenix and Anchorage and ask them what I do? No. There is no way for them to know. In some of my biggest cases my name doesn’t even appear on any paper or ECF file anywhere. Useless information.