With the sincerest apologies to John Lennon and his song Imagine:

Imagine there’s no directories

It isn’t hard to do

Nothing to rank or rate in

And no competition too

Imagine all the lawyers

Living life in peace

Woo-ooo-hoo-hoo.

There is a myriad of reasons why John Lennon never serenaded the legal profession, and if he did, he wouldn’t have sung about legal directories. They were a non-entity in the legal-services market in the 1960s and ’70s, and barely a twinkle in their progenitors’ eyes in the 1980s.

Sure, there was Martindale-Hubbell, which turns 138 this year, but it stood alone. Back in the day, lawyers felt that being rated was a little beneath them — not quite the thing for members of the bar. For the most part, Martindale-Hubbell did its thing quietly and unobtrusively. Even the ratings it assigned to lawyers — CV, AV and BV– were, and continue to be, innocuous designations.

Today, legal directories are everywhere. They promote their rankings aggressively and they know no borders.

“Firms like ours are inundated by directories globally,” says Judy Stein-Korte, the chief client-services officer with Osler Hoskin & Harcourt in Toronto.

A major spawning ground for directories has been the United Kingdom, from whence came the ever-proliferating Euromoney guides as well as the respected Chambers & Partners global directories. U.S.- originated directories, such as Best Lawyers, have started to penetrate the Canadian market and, of course, there is the homegrown Lexpert with its portfolio of directory products.

When legal directories first came into prominence in the late 1990s, they quickly permeated law-firm marketing and business- development strategies. Many law firms — notably those that performed well in them — welcomed them as a useful tool.

“We used, and use, the directory information in pitches,” says one U.S. marketing director. “It was third-party validation of what we were saying in our materials. It’s one thing to say, we’re a leading firm in this area. When you can point to third-party validation, that’s great; it has real value.”

That value is still there, but today even the law firms riding the top of the various ranking charts are more than a little tired of directories. Between new entrants into the Canadian market and new products from established players, they are suffering from directory fatigue.

“We’re going mad to be honest,” says Lise Monette, chief marketing officer at Ogilvy Renault in Toronto. “We have people on staff dedicated to just monitoring directories and working with the researchers involved to provide information, references, deal and case lists, and to co-ordinate interviews.”

For Ms. Monette, the time law firms need to invest in directories for their financial investment to pay off is as important, if not more so, than the money they put in.

“Directory participation won’t help you if all you do is pay for a listing,” she says. “The way I approach it, the opportunities we choose to participate in are worthwhile only if we decide to do them for a certain period of time. Doing them once will not reap any benefit.

“Users have to see you in the directories over and over again to remember you. So if we decide to participate, we have to do it over time, we have to put forward the right candidates, and we have to make sure the researchers have the right information.”

That all cuts into lawyers’ billable time — a hidden cost of the directories.

“The marketing staff time is triple or quadruple compared to that of the lawyer time,” says Ms. Monette. “So between the financial investment and the people investment, you have to focus on your opportunities.”

And ruthlessly say “No” to the plays that will just be a financial drain.

“We have entire categories of directories we say ‘No’ to,” says Ms. Stein-Korte. “And a couple into which our time and financial investment is of a size, because we identify them as an important part of our business strategy.”

In the United States, law firms hit directory overload a few years back. Many of the largest law firms significantly scaled back their directory participation. A handful, including marquee names such as Weil Gotshal & Manges, Akin Gump, and Baker & McKenzie, even dropped Martindale-Hubbell. And more would like to.

“We’re taking a real hard look at Martindale-Hubbell,” says one U.S. marketing director. “I don’t think we get any value out of it. Clients don’t go there. All of our information there is replicated on our Web site, and in a better way. But try telling a partner who has been practicing for 35 years you are going to take away his Martindale-Hubbell profile. He has no idea it has lost its marketing value.”

Gary Schober, managing partner of Hodgson Russ, a 230-lawyer firm headquartered in Buffalo, N.Y. (with, among its eight offices, a Canadian outpost in Toronto), is one of the “old timers” attached to his Martindale-Hubbell profile.

“For us old timers, Martindale-Hubbell is the original directory,” he says. “At one time, it was extraordinarily helpful to practitioners. It was the only source of finding something about a lawyer and a law firm, and every year, you’d buy the entire directory. What’s happened over time, of course, is the Internet has made a lot of the information you get from Martindale-Hubbell available in other forms and from other sources.”

In response, the LexisNexis-owned Martindale-Hubbell announced a massive revamp, which will include canvassing client opinion. “We’ve probably changed more in the past 24 months than in the previous 130 years,” Joe Douress, LexisNexis’ senior vice-president of client development services, said in a recent interview with The New York Law Journal.

That’s the card Chambers & Partners played to differentiate itself from its less venerated U.K. competitors. It has played very well in its North American and global ventures too.

“The Chambers guides have been successful because they canvas clients,” says a spokesperson with an international law firm. “Clients have had interviews with Chambers. They know these people ask for their opinion. So then, when they see a Chambers ranking in a pitch, they recognize it, and it has value to them.”

In Canada, the marketing clout of Chambers isn’t as great, but it is growing.

“We think of Chambers as a serious research house,” says Ms. Stein-Korte. “It is one of the directories we pay attention to. Their startup in Canada and in the U.S. is still relatively nascent, so it is unclear how many Canadian and U.S. clients consult their products. But we know it has significant credibility in the U.K. and Europe, and those are geographic markets of importance to our firm.”

At the other end of the reputability spectrum is “almost anything with Who’s Who in the title,” pronounce marketing directors almost unanimously. Battling another kind of lack of credibility is newcomer Avvo, which debuted in June 2007 with the ambitious goal of awarding a neutral numeric score to every legal practitioner in the United States. In some cases, dead lawyers and disbarred lawyers outperform Supreme Court judges and legal superstars.

Lawyers were so unimpressed, Avvo is already mired in lawsuits. But those are nothing compared with what the “wrinkles” in its system cost its reputation.

“When a directory debuts riddled with mistakes, it takes years to get any sort of credibility back,” says a U.S. marketing director.

Even when they say they don’t participate or pay attention to a directory or a group of directories, law firms are reluctant to disparage them on record. As one U.S. spokesperson puts it, “Even of the ones we choose not to participate it–even the ones we think are trash–we still want to do well in. Sick, isn’t it?”

Mr. Schober has no such compunctions. His “old timer’s” fondness for Martindale-Hubbell aside, he has been a vocal critic of the directory phenomenon in the U.S.

“They cater to the egos of lawyers, and they make a living because the lawyers are willing to spend money to see their name in print as a super lawyer, best lawyer, whatever,” he says.

“The great fear lawyers have is that other lawyers will be listed and they won’t be listed, and, therefore, there will be a negative interference,” continues Mr. Schober. “Despite my willingness to speak out against directories, I cannot dispute that. I suspect there may be some in the marketplace who, if they don’t see a lawyer’s name in the most recent compilation of the superduperest lawyers in the world, may think, maybe he’s not so great.”

A Canadian lawyer echoes the sentiment. “We have on occasion found ourselves buying into a directory we don’t want to be in, because all of our competitors have bought profile in it.”

Ms. Monette also looks at who else is buying in (and who’s staying away) when she’s evaluating directories. A law firm can be judged, after all, by the company it keeps –or doesn’t keep.

“We don’t want to be part of poorly researched directories, where the ranked people aren’t the right people,” she says.

Among Mr. Schrober’s objections to directories is the perception, shared by many North American lawyers, that some people “can complain their way into this or that book.” “When you hear things like that, it’s tough to give such a directory credibility,” he says. “I personally think my ego is as big as anyone’s and I love being acknowledged and recognized for doing a good job, but I’m not sure I want to buy that acknowledgement and recognition. It’s like going to the trophy store and buying a trophy for yourself that says great lawyer and giving it to yourself.”

The reputable directories don’t work that way. But the perception that one can wheedle, whine or pay one’s way into some of the rankings is a pervasive one.

“We as a marketing department certainly get flak from the lawyers when we don’t have the rankings that we should,” says a marketing director. “That is the result of a lack of understanding on part of lawyers of how these directories actually work. In many cases, they think we submit names and they publish names. We are constantly educating them about how the process for each directory works. And we’re constantly reminding them not to deal with the surreptitious ones that go around the marketing staff, who are the gate keepers for this process, and go directly to the lawyers and appeal to their vanity.”

And pocket book. One of the responses to “directory overload” has been a change in how most law firms deal with directory expenses.

In most cases today, the cash for individual lawyer profiles comes out of the lawyer’s personal business development budget, not the firm’s overall marketing budget.

Now, directory fatigue is unlikely to lead to directory death. Many law firms continue to see their directory participation as a competitive advantage, and they are getting smarter at getting the most bang for their buck. But, as they get more sophisticated in their business development strategies, they require the same of the directories.

“They will need to give us more,” says Ms. Monette. “We need justification from them that potential clients are looking at this stuff. We are all putting substantial investments into our Web sites, because we think that is the best tool out there for validations. Directories are secondary, but if we participate in them, we need to see some stats. We track things like that on our end, and law firms will increasingly demand them from directories.”

Will the directories deliver?

At least some will. To date, the people who run them have shown a gift for filling market vacuums and convincing law firms they cannot do without today what did not exist yesterday.

(Copyright National Post 2007)