Avvo only trailed lawyers.com by 85,000 unique visitors in November (838,000 versus 753,000). In October the gap was even closer, a difference of 42,000 unique visitors (911,000 versus 869,000). It's possible Martindale's multi-million dollar national television ad campaign increased the gap slightly In November.

Perhaps more telling is the rate of growth for each website. Lawyers.com's traffic is up 43% the last year while Avvo's traffic is up 127%. You'd have to think Avvo is going to pass lawyers.com in unique visitors in the coming year.

This increased Avvo traffic is resulting in exposure for lawyers listed in the Avvo directory and participating in Avvo website features such as Avvo Answers and Advice. Lawyer contacts such as emails, phone calls or website visits from prospective clients totaled 160,000 last month, per Mark Britton, Avvo's CEO.

Increased traffic is also resulting in increase sales at Avvo. I'm told their account managers have been fulfilling orders for their Avvo Pro product at a volume that was unexpected for the pre-holiday season.

Avvo may not be right for all lawyers (more focused on consumer & small business lawyers), and I have been critical of Avvo on some items, but there's little question Avvo, with it's rising traffic, is going to be included in lawyers' Internet marketing buys and be a strong competitor to Martindale's lawyers.com.

The results of a small survey on a law librarian listerv Ard follows are telling.

Of the 34 librarians who responded for their firms, 15 have cancelled their listings, five are in the process of deciding whether or not to list, and 14 have retained their listings.

Why the cancellations? Per Ard:

In the golden age of distinguished law firms, Martindale Hubbell listings were a given, the ratings were a powerful marketing tool and the directory was a great tool for finding local counsel.  Now the ratings don't matter so much and there are many ways to find local counsel.  The given isn't a given any longer and the cost-benefit analysis is proving that the cost just isn't worth the investment for more firms each year.

This is not a new occurence but as more firms are giving up their listings, it makes it easier for those firms who benchmark against certain firms to justify the cancellation internally.

Martindale is trying to add value to law firm customers with its Martindale-Hubbell Connected, beefing up its Law Digest, and adding an expert directory. But that's not going to be enough to keep law firms paying tens and hundreds of thousands of dollars a year for a Martindale subscription listing. Plus Martindale's core business is a lawyer directory including complete and professional lawyer profiles, not peripheral products and services adding marginal value and revenue.

What if Martindale-Hubbell made it's legal directory freely available to anyone, including other websites and web services? It could be done via an Open API which would allow web developers to embed Martindale's directory in third party services and websites.

If Avvo wants to build a valuable lawyer ratings site for consumers and small business people providing other valuable legal resources to the public, let Avvo embed Martindale's directory in Avvo's website. If Justia wants to build the most complete resource for free legal information in the world, let Justia embed the Martindale directory in Justia's website. If LexMonitor wants to build the most complete review of lawyer blogs and journals, let LexMonitor embed Martindale's directory in the lawyer profile section at LexMonitor. Same for any other service or product.

Sure makes it a lot easier for third party websites to gather detailed law firm and lawyer information. Plus Martindale is arguably the best at keeping such information up to date and accurate. All at no expense to such other companies.

Third party sites would be free to pursue their own business models for reveune whether it be advertising, law firm sponsorships, or selling other products and services to lawyers or the public. Martindale would not share in any of that revenue.

How does that work for Martindale? If I am a lawyer or law firm and I know that Martindale's directory appears everywhere, I want to keep my Martindale profile complete and I am happy to pay heavy subscription costs to Martindale.

Martindale could also cut heavy expenses it's incurring to draw people to their websites. TV Ads for lawyers.com running on CNN, FOX, and elsewhere? That's nuts. How many successful web services (Amazon, Google, Zappos) do you see running such Ads? Buying Google sponsored links for all the Martindale websites is expensive.

Building a community like Martindale-Hubbell Connected is laudable. But it's expensive and time intensive. Maybe there are other companies who do it better at no expense to Martindale. Maybe it's Legal OnRamp.

An Open API of its directory sure seems like a credible solution for Martindale.

Also seems to work for other companies. Companies have been coming along for years thinking they are going to put Martindale-Hubbell out of business by building a better lawyer directory. Martindale-Hubbell still pulls in $200 or $300 million a year. And the road is littered with companies who couldn't outlast Martindale, which has been around since 1867.

Also understand Martindale-Hubbell is owned by LexisNexis. LexisNexis needs demographic info on lawyers and law firms so it can sell legal products to the lawyers and firms in a targeted fashion. LexisNexis getting rid of a service that collects this demographic info, especially one where customers pay to provide their demographic info to LexisNexis as the vendor, is highly unlikely.

Am I crazy? Is it too late for Martindale-Hubbell to take such action? Would third party sites go along with this? LexBlog runs LexMonitor and my thinking today is we'd be inclined to include Martindale profiles.

I'm anxious to get the thoughts of Martindale, law firms, and web service providers with legal oriented websites. Let me know what you think about an Open API of the Martindale-Hubbell lawyer directory.

Not only may FindLaw be liable to law firms for the millions of dollars paid by law firms to FindLaw for these spam links, but FindLaw and its parent company, Thomson Reuters, has damaged its reputation and brand in the eyes of lawyers and the search community, including Google, for years to come.

Dad always said there's a right way and a wrong way to handle everything. FindLaw needs to do the right thing and to do it now.

Here's the right thing to do:

1. Acknowledge immediately to your lawyer customers who bought the spam links and the legal community as a whole that 'FindLaw, a Thomson Reuters business,' acted wrongly and in violation of Google's webmaster rules.
2. Apologize immediately to the law firms and the legal community for FindLaw's course of conduct.
3. Announce immediately that FindLaw will refund within 30 days all the money paid by the law firms for these links.
4. Perform an immediate accounting of all monies paid for the links by the respective law firms. (Appears to be in the hundreds, possibly thousands of law firms and for all I know could be $3 to $5 million).
5. Report the results of the accounting publicly.
6. Hold the FindLaw people who authorized the sale of links, who had to know it was improper, personally responsible. That includes senior management who very likely knew.
7. Establish an in-house ethics review committee and ethical standards protocol to prevent future improper conduct.

Tuesday will be the 7th day since the news of FindLaw's selling links was reported on the net as well as 7 days from when Google's Matt Cutts became aware of the violation. And at least the 4th day since FindLaw was penalized by having its website PageRank dropped from a 7 to a 5.

FindLaw has chosen not to respond - to the public, to its customers, or to bloggers. This is rather surprising in these days of corporate damage control and where word spreads like wildfire on the net.

I worked as a VP of Business Development for LexisNexis Martindale-Hubbell - lawyers.com, FindLaw's largest competitor, following the acquisition of my prior company. I may never have agreed with everything Martindale did, and God knows I am a vocal critic of Martindale here, but Martindale always looked at itself as having a reputation to uphold because of its history and its role in the legal community as a whole.

I can't believe Martindale senior management would have ever allowed this sort of thing, no matter the pressure for incremental revenue. But if Martindale did get itself in trouble, I have to believe it would have held itself accountable to its lawyer customers and the legal profession.

FindLaw needs to act accordingly if it wants to seriously compete with Martindale and lawyers.com, reduce the damage to the Thomson Reuters FindLaw name, and to attempt to reestablish itself as a respected member of our legal community.

The legal community looks forward to FindLaw's response in the next day or two.

Update: Based on an inquiry from a sales rep I want to make myself clear. In no way did I mean to imply that Martindale ever sold spam links - Martindale, to my knowledge, has not ever sold links like FindLaw did. My point was that the Martindale senior management I knew while serving as a VP of Martindale would never have even thought of doing something like FindLaw did.

Related posts:

• FindLaw gaming Google, and possibly scamming lawyer customers?
• Traits you look for in a legal marketing strategic partner
• FindLaw selling links story is spreading like wildfire
• FindLaw selling links update : Dow Jones reporting FindLaw misconduct and lawyers questioning what FindLaw sold them
• FindLaw Linkgate : Former FindLaw sales rep blows whistle

But look at the growth in traffic (unique visitors per month) to LinkedIn, Martindale.com, Martindale's consumer-small business lawyer directory, lawyers.com, and FindLaw.com (total traffic, not just lawyers.findlaw.com directory) over the last year. LinkedIn is blowing them all away.

Think LinkedIn is not a lawyer directory? Think again.

Legal marketing pro, Steve Matthews, reports 98,000 more lawyers have added profiles to LinkedIn in the last two months. Brings the number of lawyer profiles at LinkedIn to, as Steve describes it, 'an incredible 216,000.' Up from the 118,000 I reported in April.

Added to this is the fact that all major law firms have detailed law firm profiles at LinkedIn.

I'm a business person and the first place I go to find information on a lawyer is LinkedIn. Before the lawyer's website. And before a lawyer directory such as martindale.com. The profiles are complete, easy to scan, and let me know if the lawyer is on the ball enough to have a LinkedIn profile.

Looks like I am not alone. As of this May, LinkedIn site traffic was at 5.6 million visitors per month, and was growing at an annual growth rate of 351%. LinkedIn has more than 20 million registered users, spanning 150 industries.

With the features LinkedIn keeps adding and the growth in prospective law firm clients using LinkedIn, I don't know how traditional lawyer directories can keep up.

Follow on posts:

• Bastrop, Texas Attorney, Joe Grady: Martindale-Hubbell is the definitive lawyer directory. True or false. Well, false. The correct answer is LinkedIn.

No question such ads will draw traffic to the website. It will put a lot of wind in the sails of LexisNexis Martindale's salespeople calling on lawyers to retain their listings in Martindale-Hubbell, a requirement to be listed in lawyers.com, Martindale's consumer and small business law website. Also puts FindLaw in a difficult position as there's no way FindLaw is going to be running ads on its revenues which are far less than Martindale's.

Something strikes me as odd about the ads though. It would be like Google advertising for people to come to their online directory to do searches so Google could earn more money from ads.

Martindale is selling ads at lawyers.com in the form of directory listings and banner ads on directory pages. Martindale is now buying ads so they can get lawyers to buy ads.

Martindale may have already proven buying ads to sell ads is not a formula for success. Martindale used to do big buys at Google for lawyers.com so that when people searched for a lawyer a large lawyers.com link would display above the organic search results. Martindale appears to have abandoned that ad campaign.

Martindale may be better served by getting its directory of all lawyers indexed in Google, lawyer by lawyer, and do so with a search engine optimization wallop that only Martindale could bring. Lawyers would be lined up to pay Martindale for a listing then. But Martindale, as best as any one can tell, does not allow Google to index all the lawyer bio's and firm profiles that Martindale has.

Martindale has a huge asset. Its lawyer directory is the best in the industry when combining the number of lawyers and detailed biographical information on those lawyers.

At the same time, far more people go to Google for search than lawyers.com. Google perfects its search regularly to better provide what people are looking for, lawyers included. Lawyers.com is an outmoded directory using limited search fields as opposed to a full text search.

Rather than compete with Google (we've seen a lot of losers) why not leverage your asset in conjunction with Google's strength? Wouldn't Martindale be better off using the latest technology to get their lawyers' profiles fully indexed at Google? Wouldn't that be a win/win for Martindale and its lawyer customers?

What say you guys at Martindale?

Martindale-Hubbell is buying sponsored links from Google so that when someone searches Best Lawyers, their lawyers.com directory under the heading 'Best Lawyers' appears at the top of Google's search results. Doesn't happen on every search for Best Lawyers, but it's in the Google ad rotation as of Monday night.

Martindale-Hubbell has been a legacy product. It's been the standard bearer as far as lawyer directories. Martindale's peer reviewed ratings is the ratings system we all grew up with as lawyers. Now they are promoting a directory which is open to any lawyer who purchases a listing in lawyers.com as having the best lawyers? In an effort to beat out the Best Lawyers directory when Best Lawyers is searched for at Google?

The Best Lawyers and Super Lawyers lists have historically been subtly dismissed without mention by Martindale in Martindale's surveys claiming it to be the most trusted lawyer directory by far and away. Martindale may not have dissed these lists openly, but there's no question the company has enjoyed the legal communities perception Martindale was above the fray of lists claiming to have the 'best' or 'super' lawyers.

But now we have Martindale buying ads at Google, the number one place where consumers look for lawyers, to get a sponsored link for 'Best Lawyers' on top of Google's organic search results for the Best Lawyers directory. And any reasonable consumer seeing the ad would conclude Martindale is claiming to have the best lawyers in its lawyers.com directory.

Martindale would be better served by going back to its roots. It's what brung you. Claim that you are the legacy directory of choice, the directory that's above the fray of claiming to have the best lawyers. Claiming to have the 'best lawyers' is fraught with peril for Martindale.

Will lawyers have ethical concerns about being listed in a directory now claiming to have the best lawyers when there is no review of the lawyers included in lawyers.com? Will state governing bodies attempt to sanction or limit the use of lawyers.com because of its new claim like has happened in New Jersey with Super Lawyers and Best Lawyers.

No, Martindale hasn't bought ads claiming it's lawyers.com lawyers are 'Super Lawyers.' And don't be surprised if Martindale drops its ads claiming lawyers.com has the 'Best Lawyers.'

Without a way to distinguish the lawyers in the list without going in and out of the law firm's linked Web sites I questioned how well that worked for consumers and at the end of the day the lawyers who paid for those listings.

Following the sale of my previous company to LexisNexis' Martindale-Hubbell, I served as a VP of Business Development at Martindale. I had the good fortune to work with Joe Douress, then and current VP of Business Development for the small and medium firm segment. Joe's a great guy and heads up Martindale's lawyers.com. To his credit, he dropped me an email responding to my comments on the LMA listserv.

• Lawyers.com alone attracted more than 8.8 million visitors in 2004.
• 2004 traffic is up more than 50%.
• Nielsen NetRatings and ComScore rank Martindale's website traffic as #1 in lawyer directories on the web.
• Martindale's websites attract more monthly lawyer searches than any other source on the web-this includes all search engines (based on share of voice analysis by Comscore and Nielsen)
• Martindale's websites drive more than 50 million lawyer searches per year (Findlaw's lawyer directory gets less than 15 million)
• Lawyers.com alone generates more than 1.4 million attorney profile views each month. Martindale.com gets 3x that number.
• 65% of visitors to lawyers.com say they plan to hire a lawyer within a week; 80% plan to hire within 4 weeks.
• Martindale just signed deals with NetZero and Juno and now have Lawyer Locator links on both of their homepages. This is driving thousands of searches.
• Martindale will be announcing some new alliances within the next few weeks that will drive even more traffic.
• The content and community area of lawyers.com is continuing to grow. Lawyers.com just launched paid sponsorships from this area and the demand was unbelievable from firms wanting to buy placement.

I still believe lawyers must do more than have a listing in the lawyers.com directory to achieve an effective Internet presence to grow their business. However, a listing in lawyers.com linking out to your own search optimized Web site may still be a worthwhile buy as one part of a lawyers Internet marketing plan.

Thanks for responding Joe. There are an awful lot of corporate executives who would not get out and mix it up with some yahoo like me.

Joe and I are continuing to exchange notes so expect more to come folks. Maybe we can get FindLaw to share some information like this as well.

MSN Latino, currently visited by more than 422,000 unique users monthly, will have link on the home page that reads "Busca un Abogado" ("Locate a Lawyer"). When visitors click on the link, they will go to a new Spanish-language version of the lawyers.com home page.

"The Hispanic market is one of the fastest-growing demographic audiences in the U.S. and, by 2020, Hispanics are projected to represent 21 percent of the total U.S. population," said Joseph Douress, vice president of business development and marketing for LexisNexis Martindale-Hubbell. "This is an important audience for our customers because 51 percent of U.S. Hispanic households are online and they spend more time on the Web each day than the general marketplace of Internet users."

]]>Though Martindale & Douress made the decision for business reasons, I laud them for being the first major legal publisher to take the first step in helping members of the hispanic community select a lawyer. It's only a first step though as the entire directory may not be translated to Spanish - it may only be the lawyers.com home page. Enough to let the Hispanic community know there is a directory but they will need a translator to effectively use the directory.

Now if we could get lawyers.com to translate the community and content Prairielaw.com sold to Martindale and now incorporated in lawyers.com there would be a heck of a resource for the Hispanic community.