Law.com Subscribers SAVE 30%

Call 855-808-4530 or email [email protected] to receive your discount on a new subscription.

Disrupting the Lawyer Ratings Paradigm

By Joseph M. Campos
February 28, 2008

Robert Frost once said: 'A jury consists of twelve persons chosen to decide who has the better lawyer.' Although obviously a quite cynical view of our country's jury system, Frost's statement confirms the reality that clients have opinions about lawyers and act on those opinions. Yet, for nearly 150 years, clients' opinions about their lawyers have been relegated to word of mouth. Information passed on in this manner is not recorded in any organized way and is therefore not available to the general public. In that time, the only organized source of information about lawyers came from lawyers themselves. All of that is now changing in a rapid, dramatic and explosive fashion, opening new channels and communities of information for legal services consumers, and creating exciting marketing and business development opportunities for lawyers and law firms.

Since 1868, Martindale-Hubbell has provided the largest library of lawyer and law firm profiles and ratings. Law firms across the country reflexively and dutifully subscribe to the company's hardbound volumes, placing them prominently in their libraries, confident they have taken the most obvious step to ensure clients looking for legal representation will find them. Just as important to such firms is Martindale-Hubbell's peer review and rating system, touted by the company as an objective measure of a lawyer's ethics and abilities. Receiving a peer review rating is a singularly egocentric moment for a lawyer, suggesting he or she had 'arrived' in a professional sense.

This premium content is locked for Entertainment Law & Finance subscribers only

  • Stay current on the latest information, rulings, regulations, and trends
  • Includes practical, must-have information on copyrights, royalties, AI, and more
  • Tap into expert guidance from top entertainment lawyers and experts

For enterprise-wide or corporate acess, please contact Customer Service at [email protected] or 877-256-2473

Read These Next
Bankruptcy Sales: Finding a Diamond In the Rough Image

There is no efficient market for the sale of bankruptcy assets. Inefficient markets yield a transactional drag, potentially dampening the ability of debtors and trustees to maximize value for creditors. This article identifies ways in which investors may more easily discover bankruptcy asset sales.

Judge Rules Shaquille O'Neal Will Face Securities Lawsuit for Promotion, Sale of NFTs Image

A federal district court in Miami, FL, has ruled that former National Basketball Association star Shaquille O'Neal will have to face a lawsuit over his promotion of unregistered securities in the form of cryptocurrency tokens and that he was a "seller" of these unregistered securities.

Why So Many Great Lawyers Stink at Business Development and What Law Firms Are Doing About It Image

Why is it that those who are best skilled at advocating for others are ill-equipped at advocating for their own skills and what to do about it?

A Lawyer's System for Active Reading Image

Active reading comprises many daily tasks lawyers engage in, including highlighting, annotating, note taking, comparing and searching texts. It demands more than flipping or turning pages.

Blockchain Domains: New Developments for Brand Owners Image

Blockchain domain names offer decentralized alternatives to traditional DNS-based domain names, promising enhanced security, privacy and censorship resistance. However, these benefits come with significant challenges, particularly for brand owners seeking to protect their trademarks in these new digital spaces.