When I graduated from law school 16 years ago one necessity was being listed in Martindale-Hubble.  For those who are not familiar with it, Martindale-Hubble has been the ultimate index of lawyers for many years.  Anyone who was anyone was listed in Martindale-Hubble and it was the first place lawyers turned to when they needed co-counsel in a case.  At the time, there were few other options other than going to the library to find telephone books from other states.  Martindale-Hubble had a virtual monopoly on important information.  You always wondered about a firm that was not listed.

One big problem with MH is they have acted like a monopoly.  Each year you could count on a price increase of 6 to 8 percent, even as they started charging separately for the books that used to be their product.  Even though MH added martindale.com and lawyers.com, they seemed over-priced for the information they were providing.  At the same time, the availability of the information in MH (and a whole lot more) increased thanks to Google, Yahoo and law firm websites.

Our firm of five lawyers and four patent agents was paying more than $3500 a year to be listed.  I recently compared our analytics on traffic from MH vs. our other on-line advertising.  We were get 19 times as much traffic per dollar from our Google cpc and 5 times from other on-line advertising.

So I finally decided to pull the plug on MH and redirect those advertising dollars elsewhere. 

Ironically, many of the big firms are taking the same approach.  Numerous of the top 100 law firms have dropped their MH profiles.  Lesson: when you have increased competition, you cannot keep acting like you are the only game in town.