You know, I don't really know. Since I'm in the legal field, I would just ask colleagues to recommend someone - so I've never had to think about it much. My understanding is that it generally works the way you'd find a good doctor. You'd reach out to someone in your monkeysphere that was a doctor and ask them for a referral, either to the person you're looking for or someone who might know someone like that. I do know that there are lawyer referral services out there, but I don't know how active they are in "ranking" the lawyers they feed work to.

I learned something when I was in our RV on a 5 month trip across the country and had a tootache which only got worse. We were in Missoula, Montana - not a big city, clearly we had no contacts there and our home dentist knew no one. But he gave me this advice:

“Call an oral surgeon and ask for a recommendation.” The reason you call an oral surgeon is because he can’t bid for the work, it’s not in his wheelhouse. But he sees the work that dentists do and will have an informed opinion on who does good work.

I don’t know if there’s an analog for “legal”, but that particular trick worked very well for us, strangers in a strange land, with a problem only a dentist could fix. Required a root canal, which he cleared out an entire morning about a week out (rather than multiple, repeat trips as my local dentist requires), and asked “What drugs would you like for the week?” And wrote a prescription for the one I named.

We did a one-week circle around the sights of Montana while I had copious pain killers, came back and he took care of me in one sitting. Good times!