Martindale-Hubbell Profile: Claim It and Lawyers.com

A Martindale-Hubbell profile is free at the basic level: Martindale’s own profile page says it offers basic profiles without charge to US, Canadian and international lawyers, and the one page it publishes for this is titled “Submit a Basic Profile/Request a Change”. Our take: a lawyer should make sure the free basic profile exists and is correct, take part in the peer review process if eligible, and treat the paid subscription as a separate advertising purchase to price against other legal marketing, not as a step you need for citations. This guide covers how to get or fix a Martindale-Hubbell profile, how Lawyers.com relates to it, how the peer review ratings work as Martindale describes them, what is free and what is paid, and where Avvo fits.

What we could verify, and what we could not

Before the steps, a plain statement of sources. Martindale’s servers answered our research tools with “403 Forbidden” on every page we tried on 2026-11-06: the home page, the profile update page, the ratings and reviews page, the ProVantage page, the contact page and the Lawyers.com home page. We could not open a single page of either site directly.

What we have instead is search-result summaries of Martindale’s own pages (the update-profile page, the ratings and reviews pages, the peer ratings FAQ, the consumer guide, the ProVantage page and the About page). These are secondhand, and some pages may be older than the live version. We mark every claim taken from them as “reported”, and where the summaries did not answer a question we say so. Check each step on the live page before you rely on it. Two things we looked for and did not find: a page that describes a separate “claim” step, and a published price for the paid subscription.

Martindale-Hubbell profile: free vs paid

Martindale-Hubbell sells two different things under one name: a directory entry for the lawyer, and advertising on top of it. Mixing them up is the common mistake.

	Basic profile	Paid subscription (ProVantage)
What it is	A directory entry: name, firm, address, practice areas, education, year of first admission (reported)	Enhanced legal profiles on Martindale, Avvo and Lawyers.com, with tracking of profile impressions, clicks and contacts (reported)
Cost	Described as free on Martindale’s profile page	A fee. We found no published price, so we print none
Peer reviews	Allowed without a subscription if you meet the eligibility rules (reported)	Not required for ratings (reported)
Client reviews	Adding client reviews to Lawyers.com and Martindale.com profiles is described as free (reported)	Not required
Visibility	Martindale’s FAQ says non-subscribers only show for their specific firm name and cannot be contacted from its sites (reported, vendor’s own claim)	The same FAQ says subscribers show up when visitors search for specific practice areas and can be contacted directly
Best for	Every lawyer who wants the details to be right	A firm that has decided to buy legal directory advertising

Treat the visibility sentence as what it is, a vendor’s statement about its own product. We could not test it. If a salesperson quotes you a price, ask for it in writing, ask what the term is and how renewal works, and compare it with what the same money would do in Google Business Profile, your own site or another legal directory.

How to get or update your Martindale-Hubbell profile

The reported flow is one page, not a multi-step claim process. The steps below follow it. We could not click through the live form, so treat the order as a guide.

1. Write your master record first. Firm name exactly as on your letterhead and bar record, one address, one phone in one format, website, practice areas, law school and degree, and the year and state of first admission.
2. Search for yourself on martindale.com and lawyers.com. Many lawyers already have a profile. If one exists, you are updating it, not creating a second.
3. Open martindale.com/update-profile. It is reported to be titled “Submit a Basic Profile/Request a Change”.
4. If you have no profile, submit a basic one. The basic listing is reported to cover name, firm, address, practice areas, education and the year of first admission.
5. If you have one, use the change request. The form is reported to ask you to pick a category from a drop-down so the message goes to the right department. Choose the category that matches the fix, such as a wrong address or phone.
6. Wait, then read the public page. Find your profile as a visitor would, on both Martindale and Lawyers.com, and confirm every detail matches your master record. A submitted form is not a live profile.

For general help, Martindale publishes a Contact page. We could not open it, so copy any phone number from the live page and not from this guide. When you need a record of what you asked for, send the request in writing.

Lawyers.com: the same network, a different site

Lawyers.com is a consumer-facing legal directory. Search results show lawyer and firm pages there with ratings and reviews that are labelled as coming from the Martindale-Avvo Legal Network, and Martindale’s About page lists Lawyers.com among the brands of that network. In practice that means:

• There is no separate Lawyers.com claim route that we could verify. We found no Lawyers.com claim page. The reported route for changes is the same Martindale update page. The paid subscription is described as covering Lawyers.com too, and Martindale’s help says subscribers’ updates go through its Client Service Center instead.
• Treat it as a separate public page you must check. Open your Lawyers.com page after any Martindale change and confirm the name, address, phone and practice areas.
• Some firms hide peer reviews. A Lawyers.com firm page we saw states that the firm’s lawyers have chosen not to display reviews provided by their peers, which is consistent with the opt-out Martindale describes.

We could not open Lawyers.com ourselves, so we are not describing its sign-up screens. Where this guide says “reported”, the source is search summaries of Martindale and Lawyers.com pages.

How Martindale-Hubbell peer review ratings work

This is the part of Martindale most lawyers care about, and the part with the most hearsay. What Martindale’s own pages are reported to say (see its attorney ratings page):

• Who reviews. Fellow lawyers complete a peer review survey. Reviewers rate a lawyer from 1 (lowest) to 5 (highest) in five categories (legal knowledge, analytical capabilities, judgment, communication ability and legal experience) and separately say whether the lawyer has very high ethical standards.
• The tiers. Three tiers are reported: AV Preeminent, Distinguished and Notable. AV Preeminent is the top tier, and Martindale is reported to describe it as held by approximately 10 percent of all attorneys. The older letter grades (A, B, C with V) are reported to have been replaced by the AV, BV and CV scheme.
• The threshold. A lawyer must receive a minimum number of qualifying responses from non-affiliated attorneys. The number is described as confidential, so nobody outside Martindale can tell you how many you need. Ratings are also reported to be able to go up or down as later reviews arrive.
• Eligibility. A Martindale FAQ says you do not need a paid subscription to have peer reviews published, but you must be located in the United States or Canada, admitted to the bar for at least three years, and have a profile on martindale.com.
• Getting started. The attorney page is reported to say that you contact Customer Support with your name, firm name, city and state and email address. Martindale then sends access to a form where you list attorney references, and those references are contacted by email to complete the survey. Judges from a few states are reported to be excluded as references under local rules.
• Opting out. Contact Customer Support. After you opt out you are not eligible to be reviewed by peers or to review others, and existing reviews stay on your profile.

Our take: because the rating depends on your peers answering surveys, the practical lever is the profile, not the budget. A complete, accurate profile is what makes you eligible at all, and the reference list you give Customer Support is what starts the process. Do not pay anyone who promises you a rating; Martindale’s own FAQ says no subscription is needed, and the threshold is not published.

Reviews on Martindale and Lawyers.com

Client reviews are a separate system from the peer ratings. What is reported:

• Adding client reviews to Lawyers.com and Martindale.com profiles is described as free.
• Lawyers do not have the option of choosing which reviews display on their profile, although Martindale may remove reviews with inappropriate content under its policies, and a lawyer can post a written response to a review.
• A firm or lawyer who chooses not to display client reviews has all numeric ratings and feedback removed from display, replaced with a notice.
• Removal requests are made in writing to ratings@martindale.com or through Customer Support.

That makes the review sites a place to respond professionally and to ask satisfied clients, not a place to curate. Our guide to review sites for business covers how platforms differ, and the post on getting more Google reviews covers the one review profile that matters most for local search.

Removing or hiding a Martindale-Hubbell profile

We found no published way to delete or hide a basic Martindale profile. The change-request form is for editing details, and the opt-out we found applies to peer reviewing, not to the profile itself. If you need a profile removed, contact Customer Support in writing and keep a copy of what you asked for. Think before you do it: a lawyer’s name usually appears in many places, and a gap leaves the field to whatever old or scraped data is still out there. A corrected profile is usually better than a missing one. Our guide to finding and fixing duplicate listings applies if you find a second Martindale or Lawyers.com page for the same lawyer or firm.

How Martindale-Hubbell and Lawyers.com relate to Avvo

Martindale describes one network with several brands. Avvo is among them: Martindale’s About page, as search summarizes it, describes the Martindale-Avvo network as offering services from Martindale-Hubbell, Avvo, Nolo, Ngage Live Chat, Lawyers.com and Captorra, and the ProVantage page describes enhanced profiles across Martindale, Avvo and Lawyers.com.

That is a fact about ownership and products, not about your data. Each site still holds its own record of you, with its own page, its own rating logic (Avvo says its rating draws on public records from state bars, regulatory agencies and courts plus information on the profile) and its own way to edit. Our guide to claiming your Avvo profile walks through that process, and the Justia lawyer profile guide covers the other big free legal directory.

Where these sites fit in a lawyer’s citation set

Martindale-Hubbell and Lawyers.com are not in our directory catalog. Our attorneys industry page names Justia, Avvo and FindLaw among the legal directories it covers, and Avvo has its own guide, so this guide is about a site you will meet in the market even though it is not on our lists. The practical question is how it fits with the rest of your listings.

A sensible order for a law firm:

1. Fix your master record, as above. Our guide to NAP master data explains how, and NAP consistency is the term for the goal.
2. Run the free NAP checker to see what the open web currently shows for your firm, then fix the source of any wrong detail first.
3. Do the free legal profiles you can control: Justia, Avvo, and the Martindale basic profile.
4. Use the local citation finder to see the directories ranked for your country and industry, and read the attorneys citation list for how the legal sites compare.
5. Decide on paid legal advertising separately, with a price in writing, and compare it with other uses of the same budget.
6. Re-check after a few weeks. Directories copy from each other, so a wrong phone number fixed in one place can come back from another.

Individual lawyers and firms also get listed under different names, and a partner who moves firms leaves an old profile behind. Our post on practitioner listings explains why a person’s profile and the firm’s profile need separate care.

Common mistakes with a Martindale-Hubbell profile

• Creating a second profile when one already existed. Request a change instead.
• Letting the firm name or phone differ between Martindale, Lawyers.com, Avvo, Justia and your own site.
• Leaving the admission year and state blank, which Martindale is reported to require before client reviews can be collected.
• Paying for a rating. The FAQ says none is needed and the threshold is not published.
• Skipping the public page. Open Martindale and Lawyers.com as a visitor after each change.
• Treating the visibility claim as proven. It is the vendor’s statement about its own subscription.

How Citation Builder fits in

We do not build Martindale-Hubbell or Lawyers.com profiles, and we say so rather than imply otherwise. What we publish for lawyers is the research: which legal directories matter, how they compare, and how to keep one set of details identical across them. See our citation building service for law firms for how that works across 50+ countries and 50+ industries, with ongoing monitoring for as long as you stay subscribed.