There once was a day when Martindale-Hubbell was the undisputed king of resources when it comes to getting the low-down on lawyers. They sold books. Big brown books. Really big, and a lot of them. Big firms would buy the complete set every year. Small firms would sneak into the libraries to read the books big firms had, or better still take the books from the year before that big firms tossed out and make it look like they were rich enough to buy the full set.
But M-H was the rock of Gibraltar. That was when people used books. As books fell out of favor, so too did Martindale-Hubbell’s very substantial revenue stream. Still, M-H had one thing that no one else could offer. The rating.
The rating consisted of two parts. The first, the general ethical rating, was reflected in the letter “V”, for “very high.” If you didn’t get a “V”, you didn’t move forward. There was no other rating than “V”.
The second part reflected ability:
Legal Ability Ratings are:
C – Good to High
B – High to Very High
A – Very High to Preeminent
Getting a CV rating is tantamount to saying that you’re ethical but incompetent. A BV was an embarrassment. An AV rating was expected of any half-way competent lawyer. It may not have assumed skill, but it reflected what was purported to be a peer-reviewed assessment of your lack of incompetence.
Whether the ratings were legitimate is subject to dispute, but they were certainly perceived as legit, and that’s all the really matters. It was this perception that made M-H matter; any fool could list a bunch of lawyers, but nobody else could offer a peer rating that would be accepted throughout the profession as the minimum standard of competence.
When one obtained an AV rating, it would appear next to your name in the big brown books that M-H sold to big law firms. The books contained the name of every lawyer in the country, together with basic biographical information, even if the lawyer didn’t pay for a nice firm “biography” in the white pages, the M-H version of an advertisement for lawyers who would never consider such a thing. If you were rated, it was in there.
Now M-H runs a website called lawyers.com. It’s a great url, since it has all the right words. On that website, M-H lists all the lawyers it knows about or cares to include. I’ve found some who should be there but aren’t, and I assume that M-H has gotten lax in its standards.
When you search for a lawyer on lawyers.com, you may or may not find out that the lawyer is rated. The absence of a rating on lawyers.com doesn’t mean that the lawyer doesn’t have a rating, but rather that the lawyer hasn’t paid $59 to M-H to have her rating posted next to her name. It’s safe to say that it doesn’t cost M-H $59 to add the rating to the name, so I’m constrained to assume that it’s a mechanism for increasing revenue.
Martindale-Hubbell has put its ratings up for sale. Perhaps not to obtain a rating, though I once pushed a M-H salesman into giving an associate an AV rating when all he had was a BV if he wanted me to consider paying to be in the Bar Register of Preeminent Lawyers (as if most criminal defendants cracked it open in search of counsel), but to make it matter. If no one knows you have an AV rating, then you effectively don’t.
Old time lawyers take a small amount of pride in their AV rating. When we served as “peers” to review others, we took it seriously and tried to be as honest as possible, even to the point of being fair to people we despised. A rating wasn’t nearly as meaningful as being able to win a case, but it beat the crap out of having a BV, or (God forbid) a CV, next to your name. We thought of the ratings as a something above and beyond a commodity. While M-H managed it, the rating came from us, fellow lawyers.
Kevin O’Keefe and Brian Tannebaum have been pounding the twittersphere over the last few days about how M-H is trying to grab $59 out of the pockets of lawyers, holding their ratings hostage. Not too much interest in the subject around the twittersphere. I suspect that’s because there isn’t too much interest in M-H ratings anymore. Who cares about AV when your website can proclaim you the bestest, most empathetic lawyer in the world. An AV rating pales in comparison.
I won’t pay M-H it’s $59 tare to have the two letters placed next to my name. I am, for better or worse, AV rated, and have been for many years. It has not, to my knowledge, persuaded any client to retain me or any judge to rule in my favor. It’s just something that had always been there, always been mine, since the day it was conferred.
Today, M-H wants to pay to buy it back. No sale. And I threw all the second hand books out years ago, when I turned off the lights and shut the library doors for the last time.
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Until I read this just now, I never knew what an AV rating meant. In my dozen years of practice, it has never once come up in conversation or in practice. (I have also never opened an actual Martindale-Hubbell book, nor have I needed to.)
Now and then, if I saw a lawyer’s website announce that he was “AV-rated,” I’d vaguely wonder why they didn’t bother saying what the rating WAS — perhaps this AV company only rated them 3 out of 10.
It’s possible that I’m unusually ignorant here. But if clients and people making referrals similarly neither know nor care what it means, then any price is too much.
And here I thought AV rated meant the lawyer could figure out how to operate the projector. I remember a friend who was a top notch PI defense lawyer telling me that M-H was totally irrelevant to his practice, as he had about 5 clients, all major insurance companies, and he retained them by doing the best work possible.