Real Lawyers Have Blogs : Law Blogs, Blawgs, Law Firm Marketing

Long overdue for me to mention that the Super Lawyers lawyer directory is the first lawyer directory to include blog feeds. A lawyer's blog posts are automatically fed via RSS so as to display the most recent posts on the lawyer's profile page in the directory.

Below is a sample of a how the blog posts are displayed on the right side of a lawyer's profile. This one is from Bay Area family law lawyer John Hardin, who publishes the California Divorce Blawg. Not a LexBlog client, but talking with John over the years, I know him to be a fine lawyer.

Shrewd move on Super Lawyers' part. Talking with their management team, Super Lawyers believes blogs allow sophisticated consumers of legal consumers to assess a lawyer's skill, experience, and philosphy. They see RSS feeds of blog posts like this to play a growing role in their directory.

Also won't hurt the performance of Super Lawyers' individual lawyer profile pages in Google search engine rankings. Regular content updates causing Google to spider the pages more often. More keywords and key phrases related to the lawyer's area of practice as well. Unlike Martindale-Hubbell, Super Lawyers looks to be making a real push to get their lawyer profile pages ranking highly at Google.

Kudo's to Super Lawyers for being the first on this front. Expect other lawyer directories to follow. It costs nothing for directories to take this step to serve not only lawyers but the consumers of legal services.

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An OK by one of the more restrictive jurisdictions on lawyer advertising a good sign for Super Lawyer designation.

And it's not Martindale-Hubbell.

Commenting on last week's court ruling that there was no basis for cracking down on Avvo's lawyer-rating Web site because some lawyers didn't like how they were rating, the Wall Street Journal endorsed the concept of lawyer ratings.

At a time when the judicial system is under increasing scrutiny, the courtroom performances and verdicts of its practitioners would seem a reasonable object of public interest. For those shopping for legal counsel, an online rating service might at least provide some measure of transparency in an otherwise opaque profession.

The site, called Avvo, does for lawyers what any number of magazines and Web sites have been doing for other professions for years. Magazines regularly publish stories that rank an area's doctors and dentists. There are rating sites and blogs for the 'best' hairstylists, manicurists, restaurants and movie theaters. Almost any consumer product or service these days is sorted and ranked.

Professional ego aside, it's hard to see why lawyers or judges should be any different.

Though not mentioning Super Lawyers by name, the WSJ certainly seems to endorse Super Lawyers practice of selecting the best lawyers and publishing the lawyers profiles in magazines and now the Internet.

Like it or not, the Internet may bring transparency to our profession yet.

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God forbid that you as a lawyer call yourself an expert, and you sure as heck better make sure that no directory or ratings service would classify you as that. That was beat into our heads in law school more than rule of perpetuity.

It's just too darn dangerous Joe to have some poor soul reach the conclusion that one lawyer has more expertise in a niche than another lawyer. We're not talking surgeons here. We're talking lawyers. It's just too risky.

You could play this out on Saturday Night Live and not change a thing. Viewers would think it was funny as hell. If they found out the truth - that we kowtowed to state bar associations saying we cannot advertise about our expertise, experience or the regard in which others hold us, they would think we were idiots.

Good to hear via a post from Connecticut civil rights and criminal defense lawyer Norm Pattis that lawyers may not have to 'roll over and play road kill' when, as Norm calls them, the 'geriatric souls' at the bar associations come rattling their swords about you referencing your expertise and experience.

I am heartened by an 11th Circuit decision I learned of only yesterday while attending a presentation on regulation of lawyers. The lawyer who litigated the case was told that he could not list the following in his ads: ''AV' Rated, the Highest Rating Martindale-Hubbell National Law Directory.'  Why not? It could mislead the public.

The lawyer fought the case. He went to the District Court, which pusillanimously refused to strike the regulatory requirement on First Amendment grounds. Undeterred, he went to the 11th Circuit, where he found judges who acted like judges. In the absence of evidence of harm, the bar could not forbid the lawyer to list his rating. Mason v. Fla. Bar., 208 F.3d 952 (11th Cir. 2000).

The speaker Norm references also said that despite host of states scrutinizing Martindale-Hubbard, Super Lawyers and Chambers ads, no one is aware of one complaint in the state's 350 year history that a consumer ever felt misled by a lawyer's ads.

Regulation of ads, we were told, is referred to by one high placed regulator as 'the perfect solution to a problem that does not exist.'

Lawyers, not wanting to take a chance, seek informal ethics opinions approving the lawyers plans to tell the world about themselves. I am already seeing it with blogs. Lawyers are asking me, 'should we submit our blog to the bar for ethics approval?'

As Norm says, few (I'm not aware of any) decisions seem to be directed toward the blogosphere. But unless lawyers, presumably the defenders of the First Amendment, take a stand we're going to find lawyer blogs regulated on the basis that someone may reach the conclusion the lawyer publishing the blog has some expertise and experience. God forbid. Protect the children.

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Sure looks that way in Martindale-Hubbell's Google ads for their consumer and small business lawyer's directory, lawyers.com. Doing a search for the Best Lawyers directory, here's what I found at the top of the Google's first page.

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.'

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Congrats to the team at Super Lawyers who took their new website live on Monday afternoon. Getting a sneak preview last Friday, I came away impressed with the work done by the folks in the Super Lawyers' Seattle and Minneapolis offices.

The website provides a full text search of Super Lawyers, I believe, 50,000 lawyers, all of which I understand is being indexed by Google.

Super Lawyers gets a lot of flack for their name and the false notion that the company's business model is merely to 'anoint' a lawyer a Super Lawyer in return for the lawyer's buying advertising in one of Super Lawyers' 90 some state and local Super Lawyers and partner City publications. I'm not sure that's fair.

Having spent some time with company officials, it may be that decade old Super Lawyer puts more effort into screening for the nations best lawyers than the 140 year old Martindale-Hubbell, typically billed as the gold standard of lawyer ratings.

As set forth on the Super Lawyers site,

The objective of the Super Lawyers selection process is to create a credible, comprehensive and diverse listing of outstanding attorneys that can be used as a resource to assist attorneys and sophisticated consumers in the search for legal counsel.

The website also details the Super Lawyers Selection process.

I'm sure a few bad apples slide through, like any screening system. And though I haven't done anything close to an audit of the lawyers, by and large, the lawyers described as the top 5% do look like pretty good lawyers. Plus the Super Lawyers who have bought advertising seem fairly satisfied if the representations in the testimonials accurately reflect others' experiences.

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'Super Lawyers' and 'Best Lawyers in America,' both legal directories of leading lawyers, will have to wait to hear whether they'll be able to use such superlatives when describing lawyers in New Jersey.

Public hearings before a special master appointed by the NJ Supreme Court scheduled for this week were postponed until the end of the month because of problems scheduling witnesses.

Technorati Tags: Super Lawyers, Best Lawyers

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Law department consultant Rees Morrison reports that despite Martindale-Hubbell's and Super Lawyer's efforts, law firm ratings don't mean much to in-house counsel.

The Association of Corporate Counsel has found from 2001 to 2005 that in-house lawyers look to these directories - online or in print - about 18 percent of the time in hiring lawyers.

And Carolyn Elefant at Law.com's Inside Opinions, my source for this post, points out the the obvious to law firms buying into ratings as a way to market your law firm, "Eighteen percent doesn't seem like a very high ratio."

...[I]t also leaves open numerous other options for learning more about lawyers, such as perusing their blogs (if they maintain one) or searching for articles they've written on Google, or Google Scholar. So if I were a lawyer evaluating listing in one of these ratings services (assuming that option were available), and I had to pay to list (I don't know whether payment is prerequisite to listings in the services Morrison cites), I'd weigh the value of the 18 percent usage against what must be at least 50 or 60 percent search-engine use by consumers and in-house counsel looking for lawyers.

Any kid, in-house counsel too, knows that you Google what you are looking for. And for checking out a lawyer, you Google their name.

Find a ton of citations to what the lawyer has written pertaining to the lawyer's area of practice, and that's all the ratings I need. If a whole lot of folks, whether bloggers or the media, are quoting the lawyer, I know they are a trusted and reliable authority. I'm also going to give more weight to those citations to the lawyer than a rating service like Martindale-Hubbell or Super Lawyers that makes its living by selling advertising or services to the lawyers the companies rate.

Want to get cited and see those citations when people Google your name as a lawyer? Blog.

Technorati Tags: Martindale-Hubbell, lawyer ratings, Super Lawyers

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