Five Miller & Zois lawyers were represented on the Maryland Superlawyer 2010 list: Ron Miller, Laura Zois, Rod Gaston, John Bratt, and John Cord. This honor is accorded to less than 5 percent of the total number of lawyers in Maryland.
Some have questioned honors like these. Eric Turkewitz in his New York Personal Injury Blog specifically questioned how much gravitas the Superlawyers award should have. Some awards are so powerful that it is impossible to question whether politics and other factors impact whether an honor is bestowed, such as the Nobel Peace Prize and the Time Magazine Man of the Year. Oh, wait, poor examples.
You get my point. Every honor is tainted with some measure of politics or something else that qualifies the purity of the award or accomplishment. So you graduated as your class valedictorian. But did you work harder than everyone else, or were you just good at taking exams? Yes, your child turned out great, but was it the luck of the draw or your spouse’s genes, or were you really a great parent? So I think when you get an honor, particularly one like Superlawyers that puts you in an exclusive class of Maryland lawyers, I think you should happily smile and be proud. (I say all of this the long-winded way because I do not want to give anyone the impression that we are defined by these kind of awards. We are defined by our clients and what we do for them.)
I’m also proud of what this shows about the depth of our law firm. Five of our lawyers received mention in SuperLawyers. Our goal in bringing new lawyers aboard was to make sure that every lawyer that touches a Miller & Zois file could handle a case at the highest level. Does this award prove that? No. But it is a point on the right side of that question.
2014 Post Script: Our attorneys have continued to have a lot of success in making this list. Laura Zois has also been listed as one of the top 100 women lawyers in Maryland in 2015. Bob Fiore, a relatively recent addition to Miller & Zois, has been a mainstay on the list ever since SuperLawyers ended up putting it out. Our perspective on this has not changed: we like honors and awards even if choosing the best will be inherently flawed even with this list which is probably as good as it gets. But our big focus — and I know this sounds trite — is maximizing the value of our cases and our client knowing that we did everything that we could for them.