John Malpas  Editor, The Global Legal Post 

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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 American Lawyer remains one of the world’s leading legal business titles, but it has become a crowded marketplace. There are several major magazines and websites that specialize in business law news and analysis, and these are not confined to the world’s two leading legal centers of New York and London. In Germany, for example, there is JUVE, while Italian lawyers seeking the latest news about the local legal market can turn to TopLegal.

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.

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