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…

johacastillo30 asked:


Hi, I bought a beauty salon 3 and a half months ago in St. Albans, NY and the lady who sold it to me, lied about how much the salon makes a week and didn’t say that she was selling it because the neighborhood was bad and there are drugdealers selling drugs right next door of me and of course it scares the customers away. The thing is that I only gave her half of the money in the beginning and the other half I was supposed to pay it in 3 installments in 9 months (every 3 months), but the business doesn’t even make enough to cover the expenses and now I want my money back and don’t want the business. Does the law back me up on this? Do I have the right to ask her for my money back since there’s fraud? I would really appreciate an answer from a lawyer who knows about this.

Thank you!