Arizona’s Finest Lawyers:


Recently I have gotten numerous questions from clients regarding “Arizona’s Finest Lawyers” and whether they should purchase a Sustaining Membership Profile for $400/year.

Azfinestlawyers.org was launched in 2006. The attorney led organization’s mission was to “identify the best among us” and provide Arizona legal consumers with access to the very best attorneys in the State. The new website was launched as an “alternative to traditional attorney advertising” which they felt had “reached an all time low”.
I saw two issues with their goal of being an alternative to lawyer advertising. For one, to be considered a viable alternative, the organization had to be visible to the public. Besides a bit of press when the site was launched – the website and the organization was and continues to be virtually invisible to the general public. Even today, their site is not optimized. The other issue is access. As much as some disdain lawyer advertising, it does meet a community need. Of the original list of 200 attorneys – I doubt anyone billed out at less than $400/hour. Even the elite contingency fee lawyers were inaccessible to most people given their extremely high threshold for taking a case.
In the last year, however, the organization has shifted focus – opening up membership to the top 10% of Arizona lawyers and seeing themselves as more of a “validation authority”. In this regard the organization has a lot of potential. Every day people use search engines to validate an attorney by simply typing in that attorney’s name and seeing what comes up. We call this reputation management. It would be useful then if an attorney profile in http://www.azfinestlawyers.com/ would actually come up on the first page if you typed in their name. However, the structure of the website currently prevents that from happening. Even after searching for an attorney with a unique name, their Sustaining profile is not showing up in a Google search. In addition, the site seems to give no preference to the Sustaining profiles in their listings. Finally, since you can’t search by practice areas, the website does not provide a very helpful user experience. Once these issues are fixed, the “Sustaining membership profiles” and the website itself will be a powerful marketing tool for its members.
As with any selective list of attorneys – the Finest Lawyers list leaves off scores of truly excellent and deserving attorneys. For example – it is hard to fathom how proven trial attorneys like Howard Snyder or Craig Knapp could be left off any “finest lawyer” list or how any discussion of the best divorce lawyers in Phoenix could leave off S. Alan Cook. This may be due to the fact that AFL used the State Board of Legal Specialization as a primary means of assembling the expanded list. While being a Board Certified Specialist is a great achievement, it doesn’t necessarily you are one of the top 10% attorneys in Arizona. In fact, most attorneys recognize that there are some “Specialists” that don’t pass the snicker test from their peers. The other issue with relying on Legal Specialization is that it precludes numerous practice areas where certification as a specialist does not exist and over-represents other practice areas. Take Susan Martin who practices in a niche area where there is no board of specialization. Susan is one of the preeminent ERISA class action attorneys in the entire Country. She has secured verdicts and judgments against some of the biggest employers in Arizona, recovered many tens of millions of dollars for her clients and received the 2nd highest score on her Arizona bar exam when she took it. You would be hard pressed to find a more competent jurist anywhere, yet she is conspicuously absent from the Finest Lawyers list.
It should be noted that there are no perfect select list of attorneys. Most attorney ranking sites have a nominating process that favors established attorneys in large firms.
With all that said, the selectees for “Arizona’s Finest Lawyers” that I work with are indeed outstanding attorneys and I am personally honored to help represent so many of them online:

Bankruptcy: Joseph Mcdaniel,   Criminal Law: Joseph Chornenky, Bruce Feder, Rachelle Ferraro, Craig Gillespie, Thomas A. Gorman, William Foreman, Howard Snader, Estate Planning: Thomas W. Bade, Morris Kaplan, Family Law: William Bishop, Charles Hallam, Kent Winsberg, Personal Injury/Medmal: Danny Adelman, Mike Beale, Robert Bohm, Louis Diesel, Paul Englander, Mack T. Jones, Stephen I. Leshner, Barry Lewin, Jon Micheaels, Jim Page, Richard Plattner, William Sandweg III, Thom Slack, Nick Vakula, Frank Verderame Real Estate: James F. Byrne, Michael J. Curley, Stephen C. Earl, Kathleen Fox, James Nearhood, Lynne A. Lagarde Workers Compensation: Avery Crossman, Harlan Crossman, Charles Wilmer,