Who Rates Whom?

Appearing every year in five gigantic tan volumes of more than 3,000 pages each, and selling for a handsome price of $85, the Martindale-Hubbell Law Directory is to the legal profession a combination of Who's Who and Standard & Poor's, with perhaps a touch of the Social Register. Since 1868, it has undertaken not only to list every member of the bar in the U.S. and Canada, but also to rate many of them from c to a (for "legal ability," based in part on years of practice), plus an occasional and mysterious v (for "very highly" recommended). In some cases it also publishes an attorney's "estimated worth" (from 7 for "under $5,000" to 1 for "over $100,000"), and tells whether he pays his bills promptly.

Not to be rated at all can be an aggravation, according to Israel Steingold, 68, a successful lawyer in Norfolk, Va., and long a leading member of the American Trial Lawyers Association. Not long ago, Steingold was grumbling to a friend that the lack of a rating had cost him a client, since people looking for out-of-town lawyers tend to check the entries in Martindale-Hubbell. Steingold was grumbling to the right man: Melvin Belli, free-swinging crusader against every variety of tort. Belli promptly filed a class-action suit against Martindale-Hubbell on behalf of Steingold and all other non-rated lawyers (a group that includes Belli himself). His demand: $2,000,000.

"The money just makes it interesting," said Belli, "but I've been sore at Martindale-Hubbell for years." At the heart of Belli's charge is the question of how Martindale-Hubbell compiles its ratings. According to his complaint, the firm sends out confidential questionnaires from its headquarters in Summit, N.J., to already-rated attorneys in an applicant's area. Belli argues that this system creates "a self-perpetuating trust" that favors "a small, silk-stocking, knickerbocker, split-fee club of inept commercial lawyers," and discriminates against "far more capable young lawyers who are not yet involved with the Establishment." To support his contention, Belli cites the fact that although the A.B.A. canons of ethics forbid lawyers to advertise, the A.B.A. has permitted firms and individual lawyers to take ads in any approved law list; Martindale-Hubbell is the only such approved list that bestows ratings. All of this, says Belli, violates antitrust rules and defames outsiders.

In Summit, Martindale-Hubbell answered questions about its methods with a discreet and noncommittal silence.

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