Ah me, so wine lives longer than miserable man.
So let us be merry. And Super. And Connected.
—Satyricon, Chap 34, by Petronius, with one edit 1900 years later.
Hall of Lame. Hall of Same. Or Getting There? Our feisty friends at The Legal Satyricon report that: “The New Jersey Supreme Court has ruled that lawyers can advertise themselves as being ‘Super Lawyers,’ ‘the best lawyers in America,’ or similar meaningless and moronic superlatives.” Which reminds us that, in August, we questioned whether listings in Martindale-Hubbell–which old school WAC? respects–were worth the money being charged. See Martindale-Hubbell: Should we all “just say no”? Readers, except for M-H employees, seemed to like it. At the time, our take was:
As other ways to locate lawyers emerged, M-H never saw the light fast enough, and didn’t successfully change or expand its other services to preempt a backlash.
It continued to charge big listing fees that everyone complained about for years. More recently (say, the last 3 years), M-H expenses managed to stay in law firm budgets–but exceeded just about everyone’s irritation levels. M-H listings now makes no business sense to anyone sane.
We may have been wrong in at least one respect. Around the time we wrote that, M-H had been reinventing itself in a way that–even if experimental at this point–seems to make sense for a Martindale reincarnation. Martindale-Hubbell Connected is a new networking site, which includes in-house lawyers and, in effect, clients themselves. Even-handed Boston lawyer-writer Bob Ambrogi took a good look at it here in late November.