Rating Lawyers
When I started practicing law, lawyers would spend their days busily chiseling their briefs into stone tablets. I remember several times when a client needed a lawyer in another city, I would be told to go to Martindale Hubbell and review the firms in the City and find "the biggest" or one with a great client list. And so the process of selecting a new lawyer would begin.
A little over a year ago, Mike Dillon described how things had changed since my chisel and stone tablet days. From the legal thing, is this from his entry, The Way Of The Mastadon:
Let me begin by asking - what is the function of the law firm? My view is that law firms serve primarily as aggregators of specialized legal expertise. The premise has been that by combining multiple legal disciplines you can provide “one stop shopping” for current and prospective clients. This structure previously made sense. If you were an individual or business with a legal problem, it wasn't efficient nor effective to try to identify an individual attorney with the technical skills that you required. So, you would turn to a law firm and rely on them to direct you to the appropriate attorney within their firm to solve your issue. The problem is that this model relies on growth (the need to add additional attorneys) to maintain profitability rather than focusing on efficiency gains. In this respect, it is at odds with what I need as a client and General Counsel.
As with so many things, the Internet is changing this business model. It is getting increasingly easier to move the aggregation function in-house. To find an attorney in a specialized area, I don't need to turn to a large law firm. Instead, I send out an email to my network of other in-house attorneys or within professional associations like the ACC and get referrals. Not only that, but I get true “customer feedback” that is more objective than what I would get from a firm. There is now a proliferation of materials available on the web – judicial opinions, legal commentary and press articles that also provide information about attorneys.
This informal information gathering approach naturally will create an effort to provide some kind of ranking system so that information gathering on lawyers is more efficient, complete and unbiased. There are signs of this happening already, what with web sites like AVVO. AVVO, like other ratings, suffers from letting the lawyer control his or her own ranking. For a system to work, the outside lawyer will not be able to have a voice in it. But beyond that, it can't suffer from "the Mom syndrome." You know, "my mother told me not to say anything if I don't have anything nice to say." Because then people will be left wondering whether the absence of ratings is because a person is bad or just doesn't have clients that are participating in the ranking system. No, the more ruthless and rigorous the system is, the more value it will have.
Some companies already have in-house reviews compiled and use them to inform their selection of counsel. More are doing so. We outside lawyers need to recognize this change and embrace it, principally because it benefits our clients and also because it will happen with or without us, and those who oppose it will look like they're afraid for a reason. In an email exchange I had on this topic yesterday, one of my clients reminded me of a shared favorite quote that is apropos here. From a former Army Chief of Staff: "If you dislike change, you're going to dislike irrelevance even more."
