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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.

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