When is a lawyer a Super Lawyer?

It's not a comic book hero, but a marketing device whose growing use is emblematic of changes in the business of law.

Lawyers still like to think of their profession as a fraternity, where business is obtained the old-fashioned way, through word of mouth. Their firms, however, long ago embraced marketing, branding, and advertising as ways to compete, especially as legal services are increasingly viewed as a commodity.

That makes some lawyers uncomfortable. Yet nothing causes more debate about law and advertising than the recent explosion of lists that claim to rank the top lawyers.

Super Lawyers, the brainchild of Law & Politics, a small Minneapolis-based publisher that has rapidly expanded its East Coast operations since 2003, may just be the cheesiest example of this phenomenon.

If the name suggests exclusivity, the actual list is anything but. For the New York rankings, now in their second year, Law & Politics sent forms to 89,000 lawyers, who were asked to nominate their peers, and, after an evaluation by the research department, "only 5 percent" were selected as Super Lawyers-or more than 4,000. (That's a lot of red capes.) Their names appear in advertising supplements that run in the New York Times Magazine and elsewhere.

"Basically the way the polling is handled, I have always suggested to folks that any attorney that wants to be a Super Lawyer can be, by virtue of calling a few friends," said Micah Buchdahl, a law-firm marketing consultant. "It's not an exclusive club."

Many of the top 100 on the Super Lawyers list do hail from the city's large corporate firms, including Cravath, Swaine & Moore; Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz; and Sullivan & Cromwell. Among the Super Lawyers top 10 are some of the usual suspects who appear in every "best of" list, like Mary Jo White of Debevoise & Plimpton, a former U.S. attorney in Manhattan. These names appear in small black print, but the law firms buying ad space near the blue-chip names get to trade off the prestige of their better known brethren.

One lawyer on the top 10 list spoke on the condition that his name not be used. "I think people are gratified to be recognized at the dinner table or a school function," he said.

"It's a popularity contest," he acknowledged, and the fact that his name appears alongside paid ads, "runs the risk of it being confused as being an advertisement."

Still, when there's a contest, the lawyers inevitably get competitive.

"It's the kind of thing that if it exists, you don't want to be left out," Margaret Shaw, with the mediation group JAMS, said at a September 27 cocktail party at the Waldorf-Astoria hotel feting the Super Lawyers.

The very top of the top 10, Theodore V. Wells Jr. of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, was also at the Waldorf party. While Wells was ranked No. 1 (and came in second last year), that accomplishment does not appear in his biography on the Paul Weiss website, which notes that the National Law Journal named Wells, who defended I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, its Lawyer of the Year in 2005.

"I live in a world where we don't advertise, but I believe strongly that lawyers ought to be able to advertise and I think that the Super Lawyers publication is first-rate," Wells said.