Software
Law
Legal
John Malpas Editor, The Global Legal Post 
John Malpas Editor Global Legal Post. He was the publishing director of Legal Week, which is one of ALM Media’s flagship titles. He was previously editor and editor-in-chief of Legal Week and was a senior member of the team that launched the magazine in 1999. Since its launch, Legal Week has established itself as one of the world's leading media brands catering for the international business law community. This article is being republished with the permission of ALM Media.
______________________________________
The birth of
modern legal business news probably dates back to 1978, when Steve Brill
founded The American Lawyer magazine.
Brill struck upon the idea of writing about the business of law while studying
law at Yale Law School when he saw a noticeboard on which law firms were
advertising for recruits. “I was writing magazine articles at the time,” he
told David Lat, founder of the online news site Above the Law, in a video
interview, “and I remember thinking to myself they [law firms] all can’t be the
same — they have different people, some of them have to be more energetic than
others, more successful than others, some of them probably offer more
opportunities to non-whites than others… and I just kept thinking I’d like to
write about a law firm or two as an institution.”
The rise of the
legal business press has mirrored the transformation of the legal profession
into a multibillion-dollar global business. When Brill conceived the idea of
writing about the business of law firms, they were relatively small, privately-run
institutions unused to public scrutiny. Brill recalled the resistance he
received when setting out to report on the inner workings of law firms, even when
it came to such straightforward issues as what deals they were acting on.
Despite a move to public ownership in some jurisdictions, the vast majority of
law firms continue to be privately run. The world’s leading commercial firms
have grown exponentially since the 1980s on the coattails of globalization. At
the same time, in most jurisdictions, regulations restricting the ability of
law firms to advertise and market their services have steadily been lifted. The
emergence of the internet in the early 2000s provided an additional impetus to
the legal press as it significantly reduced the barriers to entry for legal
news providers, given the possibility of accessing readers without the need to
print and distribute a magazine. The U.K. site RollOnFriday, which was set up
in 2000, and the U.S.’s Above the Law, which was in launched in 2006, are two
prominent examples of online-only news sites.
What do these
media outlets cover? The same principal outlined by Brill when he struck upon
the idea of founding a magazine covering legal business applies today as it did
then. While all the world’s legal business magazines and websites have their
areas of specialty, the common denominator between them is that they provide
news, commentary, and analysis about the business of the law. Typically, there
is a focus on the activities of law firms — information about the work that
they are undertaking, the strategies they are pursuing, and their financial
performance. There is also coverage about the markets in which law firms
operate that seeks to identify trends, opportunities, and threats. While recent
years have witnessed an explosion in the number of legal blogs that provide
commentary about the legal market from all sorts of angles, there remains a
need for a body of trained, professional journalists whose job it is to seek
out the information about law firms and their markets that bloggers use as
material for their blogs and tweets.
Given the
plethora of legal business magazines and websites plying their trade, and the
even larger number of bloggers writing about the market, large commercial law
firms employ public relations teams to manage their relationships with the
media, thereby maximizing the benefits of positive news about and minimizing
the impact of bad news. While smaller firms, which lack the resources to run
their own media departments, may live in fear of a negative story making the
headlines, arguably it is the lack of positive coverage about the good work
they do that has the biggest impact on them. There are, however, plenty of
examples of smaller firms that have successfully raised their profile by
generating positive publicity in the legal and national press. Such success is
invariably hard earned, reflecting a conscious decision to regard media
relations as a central part of a firm’s strategy. Firms that are serious about
gaining positive media coverage need to do their homework. They need to
research the legal business media in their jurisdictions, decide which outlets
they want to target, and then get to know how they operate, a process that
should include, if possible, meeting reporters and editors, and seeking to gain
an understanding of the kind of news in which they are interested. Pitching an
inappropriate piece of news to a magazine is not just a waste of time, but can
also be counterproductive.
Ultimately, though, it is difficult to see how firms can thrive in the field of media relations without the help of regular professional advice and training harnessed to a genuine desire from key partners to engage with the media. The good news for those firms that do succeed in getting it right is that most firms — certainly in jurisdictions with which I am familiar — do it badly. This means that law firms that strike on the correct formula can gain a significant advantage. And while the legal business media market continues to evolve, there seems little doubt that it will also continue to thrive.
______________________________________________________________________________