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Enhancements to Martindale.com Reflect the Changing Law Firm Marketing Space
By David Curle
January 8, 2008
Important Details: LexisNexis’ Martindale-Hubbell has embarked on an overhaul of Martindale.com, its online resource for lawyer and law firm profiles. The changes reflect a shift in perspective, from a traditional directory model to a tool for sophisticated buyers of legal services - the in-house counsel who make key decisions on legal spending for their corporations.
The latest enhancements include a new Client Review feature, in which corporate counsel can rate their experiences with law firms. Earlier changes added tools that allow users to create a network of firms and individual attorneys with whom they do business. Creating such a network allows users to easily compare the firms with which they are considering doing business. The comparisons include outside data on federal litigation activity and mergers and acquisitions transactions, provided through LexisNexis’ atVantage service. Using that data, the Martindale.com customer can easily compare firms by their mix of litigation practice areas or their volume of M&A transactions.
Martindale-Hubbell is part of a newly-organized LexisNexis’ Client Development solutions group that includes Martindale.com, lawyers.com, the InterAction CRM product for law firms, and atVantage, which allows firms to track potential clients’ litigation activities and transactions. The other three solutions groups in the new organization are Research Solutions, Practice Management, and Litigation Services.
Implications: In the wider context, the changes at Martindale.com are part of a renewed emphasis that legal giants Thomson and LexisNexis are placing on the “business of law” generally, and client development tools more specifically. As we noted in our annual market forecast and trends report, law firms are beefing up their marketing and business development operations to build their business pipelines. There’s a low-end, consumer-oriented piece of this market, represented by Thomson Legal’s FindLaw service and LexisNexis’ lawyers.com. These sites combine legal information for consumers facing legal issues with directories of law firms, particularly the small and solo law firms that typically serve individual clients.
With these recent enhancements, Martindale-Hubbell is positioning itself as the B2B tool in the bunch. We’ve noted elsewhere (see Insights 28 September 2007 Legal Spending: Keeping it In-House) that the balance of power between corporate counsel and the law firms they hire is shifting. No longer do they maintain close relationships with one or two big firms and trust those firms to pull in additional legal talent from other firms as needed. In-house lawyers are taking a more active role in evaluating external firms and making demands around costs, technology, and outcomes. Martindale.com is designed to capitalize on those trends by giving in-house counsel a few more tools for identifying and evaluating potential partners. Law firms are questioning their expenditures on what are still seen as traditional directory products; the strategy here is to retain those law firm listings and profiles by ensuring that Martindale.com becomes an indispensable tool for inside counsel looking at external firms. Martindale-Hubbell has is work cut out for it; there are signs that more and more firm marketers are pulling out or thinking about it. Cost is a big issue, and Martindale is promising more flexibility on that front. There’s not much time to sort it all out, and 2008 will be a critical year for the service to reinvent itself.
Meanwhile, there’s no shortage of other places for law firm CMOs to spend their money, including building better firm web sites, search engine optimization and marketing, and new forms of advertising and promotion. The challenge for Thomson and LexisNexis client development products is to break out of the older directory model to better compete with more web-native marketing alternatives. The enhancements to Martindale.com are a step in that direction, but the doors are open for new entrants such as AVVO (which offers client ratings of lawyers - see Insights 18 June 2007, Redux: Much Ado About AVVO) and JD Supra (which offers lawyers an opportunity to attract clients by sharing their work product) to make their mark as well (see Insights 3 December 2007, Two Faces of Practitioner Generated Content - JD Supra and RealDealDocs).