The Rating Scam for Lawyers
Most scams are absurd - so absurd that one wonders how anyone falls for them at all; yet if no one falls for them, how do the scammers make money?
— James Veitch
https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/james_veitch_864521
Like all egotists, I occasionally google myself to see what other see about me on the web. At lawyers.com, I see an anonymous review stating: “Dan Abrahams is the preeminent expert in Government Contracts wage and hour law issues, including the Service Contract Act.” https://www.lawyers.com/potomac/maryland/daniel-b-abrahams-24615853-a/#reviews. I liked that – preeminent means number one. It is almost as if I wrote that review myself (I didn’t). After basking in the false glow of that kind review, I figured out that that website was affiliated with Martindale-Hubbell, the long-time legal services directory which rates me “AV Preeminent” which I think is supposed to be the top one percent of practicing attorneys. I vaguely recollect “campaigning” for that rating two decades ago after a colleague showed me how to boost your ratings.
Honestly, I always thought the lawyer rating business was a scam mostly directed at lawyers. They rate you highly, then try to sell you on advertising in their publication or website or ask you to buy their plaque to post on your wall. I never did either of those activities, but I did take a picture of my Martindale-Hubbell proposed plaque and tacked it to my office corkboard. Maybe I am prejudiced by my own rating, but I find Martindale-Hubbell rating to be more legit than say the “Super Lawyer” business or the many other pay for play options. At least they have been around for many decades and they just don’t seem as commercial as the upstart rating services.
The other long-standing lawyer rating service, Chambers, purports to do real evaluative work, but they historically didn’t rate the Government Contracts practice groups as a stand-alone specialty, and I always viewed them as just a promotional tool for big corporate law firms. For the first time this year I was solicited by Chambers for a listing, but I declined. It is too late to matter for me.
I mention this now because last week a friend recently asked me how are you supposed to evaluate a lawyer and find out about his or her credentials. I told him to try the internet. He then sent me a chain of emails with a supposed estate lawyer in Ohio who claimed to be holding $3.2M for a friend of his whose father died four years ago. I thought the emails were an obvious fraud, especially in light of the attorney’s demand for payment of fees in bitcoin by the supposed estate beneficiary. Fees get paid by the estate, not the beneficiaries. I told my friend I suppose you could do far worse than looking up whether the lawyer is found on the web or whether he is just some internet con artist. And the best source would be the Ohio State Bar Association.
Like everything on the internet, the rule of conduct is caveat emptor. Be suspicious. My favorite internet search goes something like this: “Is ____ a scam?” If you are asking so are others, and it usually is a scam. Only the paranoid survive. Of course, that doesn’t apply to my own ratings, which are a product of years of hard work and amazing legal brilliance. Ok, I am just kidding.