Injury Firms Advertising Medical Malpractice Are Broader, Not Better
Every guide to hiring a medical malpractice lawyer gives the same first instruction, which is to find a firm that handles medical malpractice. We read the practice pages of the 1,113 injury firms in this directory and tested the instruction. 612 of them publish a page about medical malpractice or nursing home abuse, and those firms do carry a higher score. Compare them only against firms publishing as many areas as they do and the advantage disappears in 4 of the 5 bands we can measure.
What we measured
Search for how to choose a medical malpractice lawyer and the first instruction on every result is the same one: find a firm that handles medical malpractice, not a general injury firm. It is sensible advice. It is also completely untested, because the people giving it are law firms, and the only way to test it is to hold a large number of firms at once.
We hold 1,113. Every firm in this directory whose own primary practice is personal injury, in 13 states. For each one we read its site and recorded which kinds of injury case it publishes its own page about, with the page we read it from. A row exists only where the practice is in the page's title or first heading, so a link in a footer does not count and neither does a blog post.
That is the signal a client is told to look for, and it is the only form of it anybody outside a firm can check. A client cannot see the firm's case list. They can see whether the firm publishes a page about their kind of case. So that is what we tested.
Which pages are the rare ones
The 8 areas do not divide evenly. car accidents, motorcycle accidents, slip and fall, truck accidents and wrongful death are published by at least three quarters of this cohort each. The two we are testing are not.
Injury firms publishing their own page about each area, out of 1,113
The pair was chosen for the kind of claim it is, not for being the two smallest numbers on that chart. A medical malpractice case and a nursing home case are brought against a hospital, a physician group or a care home operator, defended by an insurer that litigates rather than settles, and they run for years. That is the thing a client is told to look for a specialist in. Workers' compensation is rarer than medical malpractice and is left out of the pair on purpose: it is an administrative benefits claim with no defendant to sue, so it tests nothing about litigating against a hospital.
Nursing home abuse is the rarest of the 8 at 441 firms. Against that, 957 firms publish a page about car accidents. So a client following the standard advice is using a filter that removes most of the market, which is exactly why it feels like a useful filter.
The gap, before controlling for anything
Split the cohort on whether a firm publishes either of the two rarer pages and the two groups look nothing alike. The 612 firms that do carry a median certification score of 57. The 501 that do not carry 47. Median organic search traffic runs 895 against 176, and the median roster is 5 named attorneys against 2.
Read quickly, that is the advice vindicated. The firms advertising the harder case really are the stronger firms on every measure we hold.
There is one more number in that paragraph and it undoes the rest. The firms publishing a rarer page publish a median of 7 of the 8 areas. The firms publishing neither publish 4. They are not firms that chose a difficult specialism. They are firms with more pages, and one of the pages they have is this one.
It is worth being precise about what that does and does not implicate. Our own scale does not award a single point for the number of practice pages a firm publishes: the scoring engine reads the practice list only to decide which cohort a firm is compared within. The gap is not our arithmetic paying for pages. It is that publishing more pages travels with being a larger firm, and the things a larger firm has, which are attorneys, reviews, links and search traffic, are scored.
The same gap, like for like
So the test is to stop comparing a broad firm with a narrow one. Inside each group of firms publishing the same number of areas, compare the ones carrying a rarer page against the ones carrying neither. If the advice is right, the rarer page should still predict something. If the page was only ever a proxy for size, the difference should collapse.
Median certification score inside each breadth band
It collapses. In 4 of the 5 bands, the firms carrying a rarer page score the same as or lower than the firms carrying neither. The widest difference in the table runs against the advice rather than for it: among firms publishing five areas, the ones that include a rarer page sit at 49 and the ones that do not sit at 54.
One band runs the other way, and printing it is more honest than averaging it away: three areas, 42 against 40. Set against the 4 bands going the other direction, there is no pattern here to build advice on.
The page is not a signal about the firm. It is a signal about how many pages the firm has. A client using it as a filter is filtering for size, which they could have done faster by looking at the roster.
What the clients said
Every study on this site runs the same check before publishing, because the one measure we hold that nobody at a law firm writes is the rating its clients left. If a real difference in competence sat under the practice pages, that is where it would have somewhere to show.
Mean Google rating, and median score, for the two groups
The two groups sit 0.03 of a star apart, and the group with fewer pages is not the lower one. This is the fifth time a study here has set a measure of what firms publish beside a measure of what clients said and found the second one flat. It is the most reliable finding this directory has, and it is a caution about our own scale as much as about anybody's advice.
What this does not measure
Three limits, and the first is the one that could change the answer.
A page is not a case. We measured what a firm publishes, because that is what a client can see and it is all an outsider can read. A firm that has tried twenty medical malpractice cases and never built a page about them is counted here as publishing none. Nothing in our records can separate that firm from one that does not take the work, and if those firms are common then the thing we tested is the advertisement rather than the practice. The honest version of this page's finding is therefore narrow: the published page does not predict the firm, which is precisely the claim the hiring guides make and the only form of it a reader can act on.
Our reach is part of the count. A page our crawler did not reach is a page we did not record. The sweep reads a firm's own site and requires the practice in the page's title or first heading, which is deliberately strict, and the cost of that strictness is that a real page written loosely is missed.
The score is ours. It is a measure of what a firm publishes and how it is found, built from the gates and pillars set out in our methodology. It is not a measure of the outcome of a case, and no directory can give you one. The companion study on how many areas a firm advertises counts the breadth this page controls for, and the criminal defense piece runs the same test on case results instead of practice pages.