expertloghomegal asked:


North Carolina attorney general Cooper claims that North Carolina has an aggressive drunk driving campaign, but his cousin, Katherine Cherry Cooper is a convicted drunk driver who is now wanted for absconding from supervised probation and rehab. Even though all of the proper authorities have been notified as to her whereabouts, she still remains free to endanger the lives of other people. This is not the first time she has walked away free because of her affiliation with Mr. Cooper. What do you feel about an Attorney General that has different rules depending on who you are?

Reprinted from the HireTrade Blog.

As Kevin O’Keefe reports in his blog, one of the granddaddies of the attorney ratings business has started to charge for the publication of its ratings.

As background information on the ratings, Martindale-Hubbell states on its website:

“A cooperative effort with the legal profession

Peer Review Ratings are established by lawyers. The legal community respects the accuracy of Ratings because it knows that its own members — the people best suited to assess their peers — are directly involved in the process.”

We at HireTrade do not agree that peers are really the people best suited to assess a lawyer’s work. Lawyers work for and are paid by clients, not their peers. Clients are the only ones with access to the lawyer’s finished work product and peer ratings are based on a competitor’s perception of the lawyer and not from first-hand knowledge of the lawyer’s work (or at least not the work for which the lawyer earns a living).

Furthermore, only a small percentage of attorneys really have much peer interaction outside of their own law firms. While peer review has some value when considered along with other information, for the most part it is another archaic relic of an age when client opinions could not effectively be collected and aggregated and the legal business was filled with small-town lawyers where peers knew one another. Back then, peer review was as good as it got although it was a very imprecise method of providing information about the level of service that clients could expect.

Hard to believe that Martindale now wants to use its market position in order to force attorneys to pay for such ratings. This reminds me of when AOL decided to increase its fees for its dial-up service…