I received an interesting e-mail today, with the following paragraph:
Please accept our formal congratulations on the high achievement represented by this Peer Review Rating. You, Bruce Webster, are one of a select group of attorneys to have achieved this level of excellence and you deserve to be recognized.
This offer — to sell me a plaque signifying my “Martindale-Hubbell Peer Review” rating — comes as something of a surprise, since (for starters) I’m not a lawyer nor have ever attended law school.
I went to the indicated web site — mhur.com — typed in my “ISLN” (an identification number), and sure enough was presented with several styles of plaques that I could order, with the name “Bruce Webster” on them. Furthermore, according to this site, I was not only “Peer Review” rated, I had the highest possible rating (”AV”, as opposed to “BV” or “CV”):

Here’s what the martindale.com web site has to say about this rating:
AV® Peer Review Rating — An AV® certification mark is a significant rating accomplishment - a testament to the fact that a lawyer’s peers rank him or her at the highest level of professional excellence. A lawyer must be admitted to the bar for 10 years or more to receive an AV® rating.
According to the mhur.com web site, I received this rating on October 7, 2007, or about seven months ago.
I’m familiar with Martindale-Hubbell (now owned by Lexis-Nexis), since I have often used their “Lawyer Locator” feature to track down lawyers I know who have changed firms. And some poking around on the martindale.com website does turn up a page discussing the Martindale-Hubbell Peer Review rating and even confirms that mhur.com is, in fact, the only authorized seller of the corresponding award plaques (click on the “Acknowledgments” tab”).
I then went to the Martindale-Hubbell “Lawyer Locator” and did a search on my own name, which turned up three lawyers with the name “Bruce Webster” (all with different middle initials than I have), none of whom live in my state and — I presume — none of whom have my e-mail address.
Being a software engineer, I wanted to see this e-mail was meant for one of those three lawyers. The mhur.com front page gives you the option of either entering your ISLN (which was in the e-mail I received) or of looking up your ISLN by entering last name, first name, city and state. I used that second option with the information that I had gathered from the Lawyer Locator about the three “Bruce Webster” lawyers — and got a hit. Two name/state combinations yielded nothing, but the third was not only a hit, it came up with the same ISLN from my e-mail.
Curiously, though, the M-H Lawyer Locator had no information on this particular lawyer other than his city and state location — which raises anew the question of just how this “AV” rating was awarded. I attempted several other means of locating this particular “Bruce Webster” in that city and state, but with no real luck.
I am half-tempted to buy the plaque, but the price ($179) seems a bit steep for a gag that few would ever see or understand. Instead, I’ll forward the e-mail on to the relevant parties at mhur.com and martindale.com (along with a link to this post).
But it was a nice thought. ..bruce..
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