A few highlights: Some firms with multiple office only list the names at
the main office. Some firms list bare minimum facts and have really cut
back on the biographical and published information.
Some firms have discontinued listing associates.
The feeling I got from the replies was that the cost is significant enough
for people to reconsider their approach in having the listings but no one
seems to be discounting the value of M-H listings.
Replies are below. Follow-up question. Do you get good "service" for you
money are you clear on what you are getting for the cost of the listings?
Do you have phone contact with the representative or do you just get an
invoice with no contact?
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This is a problem we're wrestling with as well. Currently, we list all
attorneys at our main office only, no matter how long they have been with
the Firm. We have offices in several other cities, but they are primarily
unstaffed. Under consideration is the removal of information such as being
on a law review committee and organizational memberships.
Determining the value of the listing is rather difficult. We do not have any
information indicating a client came to us because of our listing. Formerly
I worked in a public library where very few people off the street had ever
heard of Martindale, so I believe this limits it effectiveness. The charts
provided by Martindale that show the number of times your listing was
accessed is not a helpful indicator either as half of the hits are mine!
____________________________________________________________________________
___________________________________I have not been able to make much dent in
our MH costs. We still list all attorneys in all offices, and include
biographical info for each.
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___________________________________
For our main office in Baltimore we list everyone in all of our offices, but
to reduce costs the branch office people get only their name and a note to
which office they are in and to look for their bio in that office.
In our branch offices we only list the names and bios of the attorneys that
actually work out of that office.
We have also tried to encourage limiting our listings to basic information.
The Principals agree this is the way to go, but many of them continue to
keep their lengthy listings. We have more control over what is listed for
our associates and do keep them to a minimum.
Hope this helps
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We list all attorneys and associates.
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We're listing all associates (we have only one office,
with 47 attorneys).
I am told that the top partners find it advantageous
to be able to refer clients to the M-H bios so they'll
know more about (and have confidence in) the
associates who will be on their litigation teams...
About all we've done to reduce our M-H costs, that I
am aware of, is to cancel our participation in the
_Bar Register of Preeminent Lawyers_, as it was viewed
as mainly a "vanity" publication.
We did that several years ago and, as far as I'm
aware, there have been no negative repercussions.
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___________________________________
Three years ago we decided to eliminate associates' listings completely.
Partner entries remained, but were edited to not exceed five lines. The
majority are only two lines with just a handful reaching four. That means
no more description of published articles and bar membership.
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_____________________
We list all associates by name only. Each year we look at the projected
costs and try our best to keep partners' listings as short as possible.
We don't list publications, honors or memberships in bar associations.
It's hard to measure in dollars the value of Martindale-Hubell listings
but since everybody's doing it everybody continues to do it.
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_____________________
We have eliminated bar membership and authorship information from all
attorney profiles. We have considered only providing the names of the
associates without any bio information but have not followed through with it
yet. The cost for M-H is outrageous and we reevaluate the need for our firm
listing every year. Please do not include my name or affiliation if you
summarize responses for the list.
____________________________________________________________________________
_____________________
We list all partners, associates, of counsel and retired attorneys in
Martindale. We only include their name, birth date, birth place, state
and date when first admitted to practice, subsequent bar admissions (we
only include other state's bar admissions and the patent bar),
undergraduate, graduate and legal education. In other words, the bare
essentials. We list no honors other than if an attorney is a Fellow in
the American College of Trial Lawyers, i.e., nno sumas or "with honors."
Still the cost of listing in Martindale is huge.
And while I'm on the subject of Martindale, their online editing is
cumbersome and difficult! I never know how the final print listing will
appear.
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We have 32 attorneys in two towns and list them all. We ask everyone
every year to shorten their bios as much as they can to reduce the space
we're buying, but it hasn't worked so far. I don't know what our office
administrator will want to do when I inform him that next year's
directory is going to cost over $11,000!!
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We list biographies in the main office location for each state and name-only
at branch offices. No firm history or non-attorney staff included. We do
include all associates in the main Martindale-Hubbell directory, but we
request M-H to list only Senior Associates and higher for the Bar Register
listings. We remove edit access to parenthetical, published cases,
transactions and agency fields for all attorney bios.
____________________________________________________________________________
_____________________
We list all associates and partners in all seven offices. We did sign a
contract with them a couple of years ago which cut down on the increase for
the first year or so.
Constance Ard
Greenebaum Doll & McDonald
3500 National City Tower
101 S. Fifth Street
Louisville KY 40202
502-587-3721
Fax 502-540-2121
e-mail csa@gdm.com
________________________
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