There is a Point to Martindale

Amid the brohaha that surrounds the utility and cost of the Martindale Hubbell Legal Directory, the Bar Register of Preeminent Lawyers, Martindale.com, Lawyers.com and so on, I think a number of us have missed the point, so to speak.

There’s no denying that LexisNexis has its hands full integrating the various sectors of the Martindale service array into a seamless promotional package. There are functionality and pricing issues, billing snafus, communications stumbles, vision impairment and foot-in-the-mouth disease rampant. Each contributes to the marginalization of Martindale Hubbell benefits because frustration in dealing with the problems makes the entire system suspect.

In the realm of indisputable, however, the first evidence of Martindale’s continuing value is from our own Web sites. Our firm’s logs consistently rank Martindale.com pages as one of the top three (depending on the month) source of visitors to our pages, after search engines. This is better than our own online blogs, ads and inbound-links, which represent significant expense in time and money for most firms.

The second is research by Altman Weil and Brand Research showing more than 8 out of 10 corporate counsel and 9 out of 10 law firm lawyers refer to Martindale to confirm reputation and skills (this from the early 2000’s, but remember how hard it is to change entrenched behavior). At the very least, this leaves a residue of awareness that makes Martindale a permanent inclusion among every lawyer’s evoked set of reference sources.

Views of our Martindale pages is my third measure of value, and the firm where I work has almost a thousand a month with about a 10% click through to the Web site (see metric #1). Here the firm’s Martindale strategy of multiple content pages (not only attorney profiles, but dozens of practice and office profiles, and regular submission of articles) gives us a wide array of content options for someone looking for information on our skills and personnel. These pages index well in the search world, as well.

Needless to say, I consider the exit from Martindale inevitable for many firms due to reasons I’ve identified before. Even so, on my firm’s behalf, that simply reduces the competition for attention and notice, and provides even more value to the promotional products our firm purchases from Martindale.

As to the future of our own Martindale participation, I expect we will judge that based on the factors above, but we also must consider the partnerships and features that benefit our social media strategy: LinkedIn and Connected.

I think the jury’s still out on Connected and will be until it exits BETA and has some time to become robust. Even so, it already leads LegalOnRamp in participant numbers (over 17,000 yesterday) and anecdotes about successful business development within the Connected network are starting to circulate.

Don’t you see my point? Martindale still has one.