Super Lawyers new website goes live

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.