Settle It Now in Avvo Top 50 Legal Blogs
Lawyers are shrewd keepers of the score.
They're in the AmLaw100 or 200, serve Fortune 50 or 500 clients and attended a top 10 Tier 1 law school as reported yearly by the U.S. World and News Report.
Every year the ABA announces the Top 100 Law Blogs, the local legal rag - the Los Angeles Daily Journal - lists the top 100 lawyers, top 40 neutrals and 75 top women litigators.
There are Best Lawyers, Super Lawyers and Chambers-rated lawyers.
Perhaps this addiction to knowing one's precise place among one's peers started with the LSAT, the SAT or even the PSAT.
In my elementary school, we had two classes for each grade and I knew I was with the "smart kids" as early as grade three. I'm able to remember this because I learned I was being channeled into what we called "the dumb kids' class" for my fourth grade school year. I raced home crying; mom called the school; and, next thing you knew, all was right with my world again: I'd been moved to Mrs. Wells 4th grade class with all of my "smart kid" friends.
That's the precise moment I first believed that my alleged intelligence was premised upon a fraud. My "mommy" got me in.
I wonder how many lawyers have had similar experiences or live with similar fears. Our fixation on pinning ourselves to charts like insects on a board certainly suggests that I am not alone.
That being said, I announce with the usual degree of cynicism concerning any ranking the announcement that the Settle It Now Blog made it into the Avvo list of the top 50 (never before heard of Alexa list) of top law blogs (no. 33).
Sigh. I'm 57 and still "in recovery" from that third grade morality play (yes, I felt guilty about being with the "smart" kids ever after).
Here are my personal and institutional statistics, followed by novelist Don DeLillo's great meditation on the same theme.
LSAT: a shameful 613
- to give you an idea of what 613 meant, "[b]y 1980 [the year I graduated], the LSAT mean for students entering the University of Illinois College of Law (no. 27) was 679 (from The Rise of the LSAT)
- 679 was the LSAT median for Harvard's class of 1969 if you're comparing the brain size of younger and older attorneys.
Law School U.C. Davis: U.S. News and World Report: No. 44
- personal number: 12 in a class of 160'ish
LL.M Straus Institute of Dispute Resolution:
Legal Practice:
- only AmLaw firms I worked for: Buchalter Nemer (199) and Pepper Hamilton (95)
- personal number: no list. of any kind. whatsoever. ever.
Blog: Avvo no. 33.
But as my mom says, I'm always no. 1 with her!
Hereafter, the great American novelist Don DeLillo on our national obsession with statistics:
America is a sanitarium for every kind of statistic. We take care of them. We try to understand them. We do what we can to make them well. Numbers are important because whatever fears we might have concerning the shattering of our minds are largely dispelled by the satisfaction of knowing precisely how we are being driven mad, at what decibel rating, what mach-ratio, what force of aerodynamic drag. So there is a transferred madness, a doubling, between the numbers themselves and those who make them and care for them. We need them badly ; there is no arguing that point. With numbers we are able to conceal doubt. Numbers render the present day endurable, herald the impressive excesses of the future and stocked with a fine deceptive configuration our memories, such as they are, of the past. We are all natural scientists. War or peace, we thrive on the body-count. If I were on my death-bed today, and did not know the date, my cells would probably refuse to surrender. Without a calendar, a stopwatch, a measuring cup on the night table, I couldn’t possibly know how to die.
Congratulations on being 33!
And congratulations to you, Michael, for being no 34!