I had a similar experience recently to the one Ernie talked about in his post today about Martindale-Hubbell. I received the same type of rating letter as Ernie did. In my case, I found that I recognized only a few names in the three-page list and I simply did not know enough about them or their practices to rank them. So, like Ernie, I threw the letter away.

However, even though I kind of like helping with the rankings, I think that not evaluating lawyers I don't know enough about is much better than guessing about ratings or giving people low grades because I nothing about them. As Ernie mentioned, the ranking system is a little obscure and I'm not sure that what it would mean if someone got that "X" rating on ethics.

The ratings always have had a bit of mystery about them and, for many years, you weren't allowed to use your ranking in your marketing materials, not that putting a little "av" in your materials would mean that much to most people.

I've actually used the Internet version of Martindale Hubbell for many years. In most cases, I'm simply looking for the address, phone number or email address of a lawyer whose name I already know.

I've found two negatives in my use of Martindale.com.

First, it really is not a complete list of all lawyers and firms. Often, it seems, solo and small firm lawyers simply are not in the database and lawyers in corporate legal departments are especially hard to find (perhaps this is done intentionally to keep them from being bombarded with resumes). If lawyers are in the database, the amount of information that is available will vary, depending on the type of (paid) listing they have.

For example, I just checked, because I didn't know for sure, whether I am included in the online directory. It turns out that I am. Compare Ernie's listing to mine and you will see that Ernie's firm probably pays for a higher level of listing, because there is much more information about him than there is about me.

Just now, for example, I checked Marty's listing (Marty, you've never mentioned that you went to Harvard), Denise's listing (Berkeley law school - I assumed one of the Southern California schools), and Tom's listing (OK, I knew the Texas undergrad degree, but wasn't sure about UT as well for law school). I would not have guessed Ernie's law school correctly. Memo to the Between Lawyers group: maybe we need to learn a few more details about each other. I also noted that Lawyer X is not listed in the directory.

Which brings me to my second observation: I've found that, invariably, once you get into the Martindale-Hubbell directory, you get distracted and spend time looking up friends, old classmates and the like.

So, over the years, I found that I preferred the West Lawyer Digest (now part of FindLaw) to the Martindale Hubbell database. However, in many instances, I ended up using both.

These days, I tend to do the quick Google search, but even there the results can be unsatisfying, especially if you are looking for a lawyer with a common name or, more likely, the lawyer's firm has done a poor job in managing its Google rankings. And then there's the all-to-common problem of law firms making it way too difficult to find mailing addresses, phone numbers and email addresses of their lawyers. (Memo to law firms: the danger of losing potential business is much higher when you hide lawyers' email addresses than any potential danger of increasing the the amount of spam you might get by making the email addresses readily available).

All of which leads to the reason for this post, which is that you will definitely want to read the Wired GC's post called "Law 2.0 Through the Martindale-Hubbell Telescope" in connection with Ernie's post, my post and any comments on them. The Wired GC has a fascinating take on this issue and I highly recommend his post.

It's also intriguing to think about these issues in terms of Web 2.0 applications. Imagine using the Martindale database in connection with the Google Maps API to map lawyers with "av" ratings (or matching other criteria) in your geographic area. Or, how about using the Rollyo search engine tool to create mini-search engine that searches only from a limited set of legal directories?

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