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By Murray Gottheil | May 26, 2025
A friend of mine, whom I will call Bill, was named as a Best Lawyer. Bill is a sole practitioner in a narrow specialty, and I am inclined to believe that having his peers vote him that award is meaningful. Unlike some of the multitude of lawyers in large firms who won similar awards, Bill did not have hundreds of colleagues to vote for him.
Unfortunately, you will not find Bill’s name in the online directory of Best Lawyers because he declined to pay the minimum fee of $1,595 per year (supposedly reduced from $1,850).
The firm that I spent most of my career with was named a Top Ten Ontario Regional Law Firm by Canadian Lawyer Magazine every time the award was granted between 2011 and 2023.
We worked hard at winning the award. We encouraged every member of the firm to vote for us and asked colleagues at other firms, referral sources and even clients to vote for us as well. One year, we ranked so highly that we did not believe it ourselves and instructed our lawyers to talk up our top-10 finish without focusing on just how high we had scored. We were afraid that it would call the credibility of our award into question if people saw the list of bigger and perhaps better firms that had ranked beneath us.
Did we really think that our clients were so unsophisticated that they would be impressed by our promoting ourselves in the same way that my local restaurant touts the award granted to it for serving the best chicken wings in town? I suppose so.
I imagine that there is a class of unsophisticated retail clients who may be taken in by this type of marketing. What I find most amusing is that while Big Law lawyers win the vast majority of these “awards”, presumably they have the most sophisticated clients who are the least likely to be impressed by this nonsense. If that is correct, who is the real audience for these awards? Mom and Dad? Colleagues? Themselves?
In my view, these awards are just another application of the foundational legal principle that I learned at my first law firm — “bullshit baffles brains”.
On the other hand, in my 40 years of practice, I never won a Best Lawyer award or a Lexpert award or a 40 under 40 award or anything else. So, it is possible that this is just sour grapes? Or am I right and is everyone else just overly invested in this marketing ploy?
Oh, finally — congratulations to all of the winners!
Postscript
So, what if all of the big firms who promote their many lawyers who “won” these awards figured out the cost by adding up the lost time spent getting out the vote and the staff time and out-of-pocket money that went to promoting the winners and then used the savings to hire more people to support their over-worked team members? Okay. I know. I’m nuts for suggesting it. Just ignore me. With this nonsense, I am never going to win a 70 under 70 prize.
Murray is a happily retired lawyer who lives in the country, drives a pick-up truck, writes, teaches and mentors. You can reach him at murray@murraygottheil.com or see what he is up to at lawanddisorderinc.com.
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