Martindale Hubbell: Another Legal Icon Bites the Dust. But It Was Once Worth Its Weight in Gold (and Held for Ransom), by Jean O’Grady, J.D. M.L.S., Dewey B Strategic Blog
In August 2013 LexisNexis announced that they had entered into a joint venture with Internet Brands (the owner of Cars.com) to develop ‘marketing solutions’ using the Martindale.com platform. Although Internet Brands is taking the lead in managing the joint venture there is no mention of Martindale on their website. Since LexisNexis owns InterAction, the leading ‘contact management’ product which is used in many law firms – it is puzzling why some effort was not made to integrate Martindale with InterAction and other LN sources containing rich actionable client data such as Courtlink dockets.
Blogger Kevin O’Keefe recently posed the question ‘Does Martindale Hubbell, as we knew it still exist?‘ ‘The answer is clearly ‘no,’ and O’Keefe wonders aloud whether the Martindale brand divorced from the legacy of Martindale Hubbell has any real meaning. The announcement of the joint venture was followed by the layoff of most of the Martindale staff. These were the people who used to curate the surveys and data collected to evaluate whether lawyers and firms qualified for the for the ‘gold standard’ AV rating. So what is left of the legacy? . . .
