The practice of law, although it is a learned profession, is also a business.

Like any business, its professionals need to market themselves to attract clients – as anyone can tell you, there is no shortage of lawyers out there. They all compete for a limited amount of customer dollars, and many of them offer substantially similar services. As a result, alongside the predatory lawyer sharks swim the marketing remora fish, competing for a limited amount of lawyer marketing spend.

Naturally, as marketers know and encourage, lawyers seek to differentiate themselves from one another; improve their position in the marketing “pecking order” with a view to increasing their market share.

Marketers have discovered an effective way to appeal to the archetypal superiority complex of self-respecting lawyers. They encourage those attorneys to seek out surveys that give superlative rankings to some of them. Superlatives like “super” or “best.”

You may (or may not) be surprised to learn that the process by which these superlatives are placed is neither as objective nor as scientific as it might first appear.

Let’s examine why.

Before doing so, two caveats.

First, before you assume we’re just aggrieved applicants who weren’t selected for these braces, know this: We’ve been invited to participate in the selection process, as well as solicited to purchase ad space of one sort or another by the folks at marketing that publishes these lists. We have made a deliberate decision to refrain from participating. We’re pretty sure our customers think we’re good at what we do and, for lack of a better term, it’s good enough for us.

Second, we are not casting slurs on the attorneys involved in creating these lists. We don’t know all of them, but we do know a few, and most of the ones we know we would consider to be good lawyers. Not “super” or “better”, just good, and we think that should be good enough for them, and more specifically, good enough for their customers.

After reading this, we hope you understand why we don’t participate.

First of all (and you really should read this award more than once) these rankings are not based on customer testimonials or customer reviews; they are not based on customer input at all. In other words, no customer is asked to participate in these surveys. Not even a single one. We think this means that it all starts with a shaky premise. For us, it’s like asking owners, cooks, and waiters to rate the restaurant they work in.

While marketers call all of its selection and ranking processes “rigorous” and “objective,” it’s actually little more than a brother-in-law recommendation system.

If you network enough with other attorneys (read spend your time at attorney-organized functions or work at a large enough law firm), you’ll be able to get enough “peer recognition” (read make enough friends who are also attorneys) not only to secure a nomination, but also to ensure that leads to “qualification”.

Where does that rating lead?

Well, the marketing departments of the organizers and publishers of these rankings have the opportunity to upsell the “supers” and “bests” with premium advertising space in their magazines and online directory services. That ad space is being offered at a “preferential rate,” whatever that means.

The “super” and “best” attorneys get all of their newly acquired status on their websites and emails too, so their prospective clients can see just how “good” they are.

However, at the end of the day, “super” and “best” aren’t necessarily “super” and “best” in the eyes of the people who really should be asked if they are or not: that would be their clientele.

They are not nominated by the people they work for and for whom they supposedly seek to achieve results; rather, they are nominated by the people they work with, just like the cooks and servers we alluded to earlier.

We believe that practicing law is about helping our clients achieve their legal goals. We don’t think it’s about seeking recognition from our professional competitors. And while we’re not saintly enough to refrain from marketing of any kind (in fact, you’ll find links to our website below this article), we think superlatives are a bit bogus.

Since attorneys often prosecute lawsuits against companies that engage in deceptive business practices, it would be good if some of them applied a little more scrutiny in that regard to their own marketing practices.

We recognize that it’s good to be well regarded by other people and all that, for sure; particularly people with whom we are close, such as friends, colleagues and family. We’re just not overly interested in impropriety, and canvassing our friends and colleagues to proclaim that we’re the “super” and “best” seems a bit impropriety. We think there might be something in the ethical rules about it.

So for now, we’re happy to be “good,” and we’re even happier if our customers think we’re good, too.