New Study: Two Firms Can Share a Score and Not Share the Evidence
The LFL Certification Score is a percentage of what we could actually measure, not points out of a hundred. Across the 217 firms in this directory, the amount of the scale we read runs from 24 points to 97. This is what that does to a comparison, and which comparisons we refuse to publish.
What the score is a percentage of
Most directories publish a rating and not its denominator. Ours has three numbers behind it, and a profile shows all three, because the first one on its own is close to meaningless.
The score is earned points divided by measured points, not by a hundred. A firm's record carries what it earned, how much of the scale we actually read, and how much of the scale exists in its market at all.
Those last two come apart for two different reasons, and keeping them apart is the only reason this page can be honest. A check we have not run yet is our failure. A check that cannot be run where a firm practices is a fact about the state, and charging a firm for it publishes a false statement about a real business.
Where the scale is shorter
Of the 217 firms here, 100 are measured against 91 points rather than a hundred. Florida, Indiana, Maryland, Massachusetts, Oregon and Texas publish no attorney register we can query, so Roster verifiability (9 points) has nothing to be a share of.
New York publishes its attorney registrations as open data, so a New York roster can be matched name by name. Maryland asks automated tools to stay out of its attorney search and we honor that, and Florida's directory refuses our requests. The result is not a Maryland firm scoring badly on licensure. It is a Maryland firm not being scored on it.
The correction is worth real points. Counting that absent factor as a zero instead of removing it would have cost the 100 firms between 1 and 7 points each. WGK Personal Injury Lawyers, the highest scoring of them, would read 59 instead of 65. That is the difference between measuring a firm and measuring a state's records policy.
The eligibility gates have the same problem and the same answer. A gate here has three states rather than two: passed, failed, or nothing to check it against.
Firms for which each eligibility gate could actually be checked
In total, 156 firms carry at least one gate nobody can check, and 146 of them are outside New York, for the reason above.
The other 10 are in New York, and their reason is the opposite one: those firms publish no attorney roster at all, so there is no name to look up in a register that does exist. The register is open. There is simply nobody to check. We counted how often each of those two things stops the check across the whole directory, and the firm side of it is larger than this page's New York figure suggests.
What actually breaks a comparison
That New York case is the hint that the state line is not the real problem. What decides whether two totals can be set beside each other is coverage: how much of the scale available in a firm's market we managed to read.
How much of the available scale we read, across 217 firms
Total withheld from comparisonTotal published for comparison
Only 5 firms fall under that line, and they are the interesting part: they sit in New York, Florida and Maryland. Not one of them is on the shorter scale. Every one had the whole 100 points available to it, and not one was read on more than 24 of them.
The clearest way to see it is to take a score that more than one firm holds. In this directory, 9 firms score 54.
Points of the scale we measured, for the 9 firms that all score 54
Schotter Millican, LLP earned that 54 across 97 points of evidence. Jiles & Fugate Law Group earned the same 54 across 24. The second number is not a worse score. It is barely a score at all, which is why the profile shows the evidence instead of offering the number.
What limits the comparison, across all 217 firms
- 112Full scale, total published for comparison52% of firms
- 100Shorter scale, 91 points available in the market46% of firms
- 5Too little of the scale read, total withheld2% of firms
That is the finding, and it is not the one we expected to write. The shorter scale is real and it affects 100 firms. It breaks no comparison at all. Every firm on the shorter scale still clears the line, and every total we withhold belongs to a firm that had the whole scale available and was barely read.
The largest gap is ours
Once the state lines are accounted for, the largest missing piece of the score belongs to us. Experience is unmeasured on 159 of the 217 firms in the directory, which is 10 points of the scale that most of these firms have never been scored on, in any state.
It is not a source that does not exist. It is a measurement we ran out of budget for, recorded as pending rather than as a zero, which keeps it out of every denominator on the site. That is the right handling and it is not an excuse: a pending check is a gap in our work, and it counts against our coverage exactly as it should.
The same arithmetic explains something that would otherwise look like a verdict on the states that have none. Of the firms in this directory, 2 are certified, and every one of them is in New York.
The shorter scale is not why. The highest total outside New York belongs to Anderson Injury Lawyers, at 67, which is 3 points short of the mark. It is also one of the totals we decline to publish for comparison, because it was computed from 78 points of scale. The highest total outside New York that we do publish is 67.
What separates the markets is not the length of the ladder, then, but how far up it we have got. The median New York firm has been read on 97% of the scale available to it, against 86% for the median firm outside it. That is our backlog, not a finding about Texas, Florida, Maryland, Indiana, Massachusetts and Oregon lawyers.
We publish those markets anyway, with the coverage on every profile, because a thin measurement that says it is thin is more use than a confident one that is not. You can see them at Baltimore, Boston, Dallas, Lakeland, Naples, Northwest Indiana and Portland.
How to read a score here
Three habits, which apply to any rated directory and not only to this one.
Read the denominator before the number. Every profile here states how much of the scale was measured. A rating that does not tell you what it is a share of is asking to be taken on trust.
Compare inside a market, not across one. The ranked pages exist for that: personal injury firms and workers' compensation firms are ordered within a city, against the firms someone could actually hire instead.
Treat a low score and a thin score as different things. A firm we have barely measured is not a bad firm, and the profile will say which of the two it is. A firm that thinks we have measured it wrongly can see every sub-factor and the source behind it.
The rest of this section takes the same approach to individual pillars. We measured what it takes to check a law firm at all for pillar A, counted what a case results page actually proves for pillar B, what a Google star rating is worth for pillar C, and what a speed test measures for pillar D. The full methodology sets out every gate and sub-factor, and every profile links back to the source for each one.
Figures on this page come from the score records committed with each firm: earned points, measured points, available points and coverage, plus the eligibility gates. Firms marked as samples or not eligible are excluded throughout.