Legal Marketing & PR

Significant Change To U.S. News/Best Lawyers Law Firm Rankings

By Larry Bodine

US News & World Report has announced that the publication will drop their controversial effort to rank law firms and will instead adopt an alphabetical listing in a "tiered" rating system instead. The "best law firms rankings will be published alphabetically within tiers rather than as a numerical ranking.

"They finally reached the conclusion that the validity in such a ranking system is flawed: "firms were often separated by small or insignificant differences in the overall score."  This was just one of the major concerns with the proposed ranking system," said Hilary Guthrie, Director of Planning and Business Development at Harris Beach PLLC in Pittsford, NY.

Nearly 2,000 law firm marketing directors and administrators fell prey to the latest in a serious of meaningless rankings, by feeding information to the magazine. It's too bad. They should have read Only 3% of Legal Work is Influenced by Directories. See also Do Chambers Ratings Matter? NO. "Only private practitioners refer to these directories. Business leaders/owners and in-house counsel are not influenced by them," Guthrie said.

Here's the catch: to be considered in the US News ratings, a law firm must be included in yet another directory: to be eligible for a metropolitan area rating, a firm has to have at least one lawyer listed in Best Lawyers.

So how do you get into Best Lawyers? Pathway No. 1 is to be in it already. Every lawyer in the previous edition is nominated for inclusion in the next edition. It's not different from a self-perpetuating club. The public can "nominate" lawyers, but they don't count very much, according to the Best Lawyers FAQ.

Pathway No. 2 is to have a lawyer nominate you. However, the voters for existing lawyer categories consists of all lawyers who are currently listed. As a result, many "best lawyers" are members of the older generation.

The US News effort is basically a clumsy ploy to sell ads, magazines and directories. Described most generously, it is a cross-marketing effort between two directories trying to survive in a market where directories don't matter.

The U.S. News-Best Lawyers Best Law Firms rankings, are scheduled to be released on its website in mid-September. Everyone who loves a popularity contest will be sure to read it.

Full post as published by Larry Bodine's LawMarketing Blog on July 06, 2010 (boomark / email).