Wednesday, March 21, 2007 6:50 AM
Earlier in the week, I ran across a post from Robert Ambrogi, Now on Martindale: Top 10 Lists, noting that Martindale was offering "Top 10 Lists" based on a variety of criteria:
They rank the top law firms in three categories: top 10 peer-review rated, which ranks the firms with the highest number of peer-review-rated lawyers; top 10 by activity, which ranks firms in different subject areas by he total number of federal cases during the past two years or total number of transactions; and top 10 by visibility, which ranks firms according to the number of times it has been searched during the past month.
Last night, I went to the source at took a look at Martindale.com's "Top 10" lists. The introduction to the pages is as follows:
Welcome to the law firm Top 10 lists section of martindale.com. Below you will find several top 10 lists highlighting law firms across several topics such as the Martindale-Hubbell Peer Review Ratings, litigation and transaction activity (ie. mergers and acquisitions) and law firm visibility as indicated by user activity on martindale.com. View the top 10 lists to find information about attorneys and their law firms. Continue to check back as these Top 10 lists of law firms will be updated on a regular basis.
As I looked through the rankings in a variety of categories, I could not help but think about blawgs such as MoneyLaw and LawBall. Why? Metrics.
The common theme I see is metrics. Specifically, the application of metrics to the legal space and people and businesses working within it. Martindale, for one, already lets registered visitors perform side-by-side comparisons of law firms using data from a variety of databases it maintains. As more data becomes available, I would expect such comparison models to increase in number, as well as broaden and deepen in scope.
Think of court filings and the huge volume of public records on which a lawyer's or law firm's name is affixed. Once these records are added to a Lexis or Thomson-West database, they can be cross-referenced to other databases existing within these enterprises. Moreover, many of the top legal research providers have already refocused their internal data structures to more actively embrace XML. Technology aside, this is important because XML gives them exponentially more flexibility to match up and interconnect disparate data sources. Once interconnected, it is a relatively small matter to push the results to the web.
The day may arrive when corporate counsel will be able to drill down on individual lawyer's names and find a vast trove of data pertaining to that lawyer (to some degree, this already exists). And, beyond simple lists of things like articles written, cases filed, awards received, we may see the data formulated into charts, statistics and rankings (the latter of which Martindale is obviously already doing). Percentage of cases won; number of articles written in comparison to peers; peer review ranking in comparison to other peers; number of firm's lawyers receiving top rankings compared to peer firms, the list could go on and on. One thing about data; it can be sliced and diced in a thousand ways.
What does this all mean? Candidly, I am not sure. At this point, I don't believe that metrics alone will determine things like who lands the new client or who gets tenure. There are too many age-old processes like personal networking and reputation among peers deeply engrained in the legal space. However, metrics could well play a growing role in decision-making. We may even see the use of metrics as part of a standard due diligence process, just to ensure every T has been crossed.
In the end, there are many people who have given this subject much deeper thought than I (such as the writers at MoneyLaw and LawBall). But, even from a shallower perspective, it is obvious that the use of metrics is rising. And, as Martindale's Top 10 lists exemplify, the metrics will be online and easily available. For lawyers, these realities are worth remembering.