Can Martindale-Hubbell fight back? | Knowledge Management

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Jan 162008

With all of beatings that Martindale-Hubbell has been taking recently (See here and here), it seems that they have been trying to fight back with ads.  There are also and subtle “news stories.”  New Yorkers have noticed ads on New York City phone booths touting M-H as source that “9 out of 10 lawyers consult … when selecting counsel.“  There’s a piece of “news” from Fox 23 News in Albany, New York that asks: “Why is it important for an attorney to have references?“ (looks like an ad to me). 

M-H says that it is trying to stay relevant and re-create itself to keep up with the times.  But some people, especially “Real Lawyers Have Blogs” blogger Kevin O’Keefe, seem to suggest that Martindale will go the way of the dodo.  Perhaps, as with the dodo, only time will tell. 

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Posted by Patrick DiDomenico at 11:28 am
  • Barry Solomon

    Staying relevant and re-creating Martindale-Hubbell starts with really listening to the market and then taking action. Let me give a few examples of this:

    Kevin O’Keefe recently suggested that we introduce a blog on martindale.com. His idea was that we include those in leadership positions as well as others in business development and product development. Great idea; thanks Kevin! So in the latest release of martindale.com that’s one of our enhancements:

    http://www.martindale.com/blogs/

    Earlier, Kevin commented that we should introduce RSS feeds. We’ve added these too. On martindale.com, for example, we now distribute our new blog and our legal articles by practice area and industry this way:

    http://www.martindale.com/rss/

    Lawyers have suggested that we add objective content such as transactions and the actual litigation in which firms are involved. We’ve started by bringing in M&A data and Federal litigation data showing a firm’s top areas by practice area and jurisdiction:

    http://www.martindale.com/Kirkland-Ellis-LLP/law-firm-104607-litigation-activity.htm

    Corporate counsel asked for tools to help them do what they were already doing with martindale.com, but not as easily as they would have liked: compare firms and manage their preferred provider lists. We introduced our side-by-side comparisons and our My Martindale Network in response. You can register and take a look at that functionality here:

    http://www.martindale.com/secure/Registration.aspx

    And we’ve listened to the staff lawyers within corporate legal departments that use martindale.com to do some of their research, particularly when they’re asked to winnow down from a larger list of lawyers and law firms to get to those few that should really be considered for a new matter. They asked that we enhance our searching in a number of ways including integrating our Counsel Select functionality into lexis.com and by adding filtering to make refining searches easier. You can check out the new filtering by just doing a search at http://www.martindale.com.

    By no means is this perfect or are we done. We want to continue to listen, learn, and take action. Everything described above, though, are not mere promises. We’ve delivered. By focusing on providing value, listening to the market, and taking appropriate action in response we are revitalizing Martindale-Hubbell.

    –Barry

    Barry Solomon
    Vice President, Client Development
    LexisNexis

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