Posts tagged ‘Above The Law’

  • 30 Oct 2018 at 2:24 PM
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Introducing The Above the Law Writing Contest

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Legal writing and media is not immune to the diversity problem of the legal industry. Publications are just as likely to have their own implicit biases. And online trolls have a special place in their empty hearts for targeting women, non-binary persons, and people of color. Yet the voices that rise above and lead thinking in the legal industry have an opportunity to make a real impact.  

Breaking Media is proud to say that 60 percent of its staff is female, 40 percent of its editorial leads are women, and 40 percent are people of color. Above the Law is the largest publication in the legal industry with 1,300,000 unique readers a month and 10,000,000 pageviews a month. I may be biased, but we have the best talent, and our diversity is a strength.

Above the Law would not have its success without its 100+ incredible columnists. To ensure Above the Law has a pipeline of the best writing talent, and a publication with a variety of opinions and perspectives, ATL will launch its inaugural writing contest. We are particularly looking for underrepresented voices — people of color, LGBTQ+, women — and new voices who want to publish across a broad range of topics. You do not need to be an established writer, or have published elsewhere. We don’t care if you have 10 followers on social media or 10 million. 

We will be providing editorial support and a platform for distribution, and most importantly, prize money. To participate, please submit one article idea with your name and email here. Please limit the article pitch to 250 words or less. 

ATL editors will review the article pitches and select a group of finalists to publish the article for publication. All finalists’ stories will publish on Above the Law and be featured in an ATL eBook.

One winner will be chosen based on editorial feedback, web engagement (time on page, social shares, pageviews), and reader feedback.

All finalists who publish will be paid the standard ATL columnist fee. The winner will receive bragging rights, a columnist position at ATL, and $1,000 bonus.

If you are new to writing or blogging, or just want some one-on-one time with editors, Staci Zaretsky and Kathryn Rubino will be hosting a live chat on Thursday, November 28 at 3:30 p.m. They will share tips for starting out, finding your voice, and answering questions.

Interested? Enter the contest here, and save these dates:

  • Facebook Live video: 11/29/2018
  • Story Pitches due: 12/19/2018
  • Finalists selected: 1/16/2019
  • Publication: 3/1/2019
  • Finalist chosen: 4/4/2019

If you’re not ready to submit, but want to reminders for deadlines, submit your email here.



Coming in 2019 – Above the Law Influencers Network

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The average American adult spends more than 11 hours consuming digital media each day. Simultaneously, our attention span has diminished below eight seconds – equivalent to that of a goldfish. This is why every single legal media brand, and your uncle, is producing content.

Over the years, Above the Law (ATL) has expanded its coverage to meet this need. Our five editors publish, share, argue, and defend takes on the news that matters to lawyers and the legal industry. Our network of 100+ expert columnists shares ground-level viewpoints on law practice, law school, law firm management, in-house counsel, the business of law, technology and innovation, emerging practice areas, government, the courts, and public interest. Today, we curate and publish approximately 20 original articles per day, for an average of 10,000,000 pageviews and 1,300,000 unique readers per month. David, Elie, Staci, Joe, and Kathryn have built the largest distribution platform in the legal industry, and they do it every single day, month, and year.

We also understand the limits of the industry we serve. There are only 1,300,000 lawyers in the US, and 150,000 law students. There are only 24 hours in a day, and someone has to bill time. Our editors will continue the daily fight for media and distribution dominance, and we will deepen our focus into heavily-researched journalism and editorial to strengthen our relationships with readers.

In 2019, Above the Law will launch the ATL Influencers Network. The Influencers Network will provide a platform for legal industry thought leaders to:

  • Publish long-form editorial projects on the largest distribution platform in the legal industry,
  • Utilize the ATL research team’s capabilities with surveys, data collection, mining, and analysis,
  • Leverage the ATL editorial team’s storytelling expertise.

ATL Influencers will receive a column on Above the Law, payment for their work, and the opportunity to earn more money with Above the Law sponsored editorial and custom projects.

The ATL Influencers Network will be limited to 10 Influencers in its first year. Our influencers will be passionate about, and interested in building, an editorial projects in the following areas:

  • alternative legal service providers
  • big data, data analytics
  • business of law and law firm economics
  • emerging practice areas
  • in-house practice and operations
  • law firm innovation and change management
  • legal education for law students, and pre-law students
  • legal technology
  • legal research
  • solo and small law firm practice management

If you are interested in participating, please email Brian Dalton, VP of Special Projects bdalton [at] breakingmedia.com.

Evolve​ ​Law​ ​will​ ​join​ ​Above​ ​the​ ​Law​ ​in​ ​Spring​ ​2018

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Since 2014, Evolve Law has built the largest community of legal tech startups and innovators in the world with 150+ member companies. In 2017, Evolve Law partnered with Above the Law to significantly member benefits and reach, and in 2018, Evolve Law will merge into Above the Law.

Evolve Law CEO Mary Juetten commented, “I have enjoyed developing our strategic partnership with Above the Law and the plan to merge Evolve Law’s legal tech toolkit into Above the Law’s Innovation Center: Evolve the Law. Above the Law is a natural home for the Evolve Law members and this transition will allow me to focus on Traklight and my writing.”

Above the Law will oversee day-to-day operations while Juetten will collaborate on the strategic vision, support and attend many signature events, and contribute regularly to Above the Law as a columnist. Juetten added, “I am looking forward to seeing Above the Law build on Evolve Law’s community, particularly as we open up membership to public interest companies, legal departments, and law schools.”

“As the largest community for lawyers in the US, we are excited to fully integrate the Evolve Law community into the Above the Law brand” stated Hsiaolei Miller, Group Publisher of Above the Law. Above the Law now reaches 1.58 million members of the legal community monthly across its media platforms. All Evolve Law members will receive special access to this community as part of the merger.

This merger is the foundation to many new developments at Above the Law, including:

  • Launch of Evolve the Law, ATL’s Legal Innovation Center (ETL), and upcoming legal tech directory
  • Expanding access to Evolve Law Signature Events to reach a larger audience
  • Focus on innovation across industries in health,IT, Fintech, RegTech, and legaltech

The first ATL | EL signature event is in NYC on Jan 30 th , 2018 and Darwin Challenge applications are now open. For more information email elmembers@abovethelaw.com.

Testing a Truncated RSS Feed on Above the Law: The Results Are In

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It’s time to wrap up the month-long trial of truncated RSS feeds on Above the Law. I had somewhat put the conclusion cart before the research horse, in that I marked the last day of this experiment in my calendar with the phrase “eat humble pie re. RSS.” And if you wait just a minute I will feed myself at least a small slice, but first let me share our findings.

One of my key concerns about the full RSS feed is that it is used by web scrapers to steal our content, which not only means they derive entirely unjustified benefit from our editors’ efforts but also leads to duplicate content that can hurt SEO efforts. On this front, the anecdotal evidence suggests that truncating the feed helped. In the earlier months of this year we had identified anywhere from 2-6 scrapers stealing all our content, but during May when we were truncating the feed we found no new examples. One of the perpetrators we’d already identified continued scraping the content, but was now getting just the abbreviated stories.

Of course the most common complaint from publishers about full RSS feeds is that subscribers get all the content in their readers, don’t click through to the site, and therefore aren’t monetized in any meaningful way. In the case of ATL, truncating the feed definitely increased the number of people clicking through to the site. Visits from our full feed were about 4% of our total traffic before we truncated it, but jumped to about 7% of total traffic in the month of the truncation trial. In our case this translated to something in the region of an additional 100,000 impressions, which isn’t going to make us rich, but would be worth more dollars and cents than we could make running ads in the RSS feed.

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  • 19 May 2010 at 1:59 PM
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Elena Kagan and The Albino: Giving You the Journalism You Deserve

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On Monday, May 10, President Barack Obama announced his nomination Elena Kagan to the U.S. Supreme Court, to fill the seat soon to be vacated by Justice John Paul Stevens. Kagan — the current Solicitor General and former dean of Harvard Law School, and the first woman in each of these offices — is a distinguished lawyer and a worthy nominee. Expect her to be easily confirmed.

Elena Kagan Princess BriderOn Above the Law, we’ve covered the Kagan nomination with our traditional high-low mix. The highbrow fare has included a personal essay by my colleague, Elie Mystal, on the experience of studying under Kagan at Harvard Law School; a thoughtful, historically informed analysis on the required credentials for nominees (fun fact: you don’t need a law degree); and an exegesis of a 1995 law review article Kagan wrote, in which she described Supreme Court confirmation hearings as a “vapid and hollow charade.”

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Was Gawker’s Decision to Identify the ‘Racist’ Harvard Emailer Unethical? We Say Yes.

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The notion of online privacy may be nothing more than a “fallacy,” as one New York judge recently opined, but anyone concerned with both the free-flow of information and with being fair to the subjects of news coverage will confront this question:  Do bloggers and journalists have a responsibility to protect the identities of the subjects? We know that sources enjoy all manner of ethical protection, but what of the people we write about, many of whom who are public figures only in the broadest definition of the term?

This issue hit home just last week when a Harvard law student became famous on the web. Or infamous, rather.  After a conversation with a few friends last November about affirmative action, she raised the possibility that race may be a genetic determinant for intelligence. Unwisely, she made this suggestion via email.

Crimson DNAWhen she had a falling out with one of those friends, that friend-turned-enemy disseminated her old email, including her name, campus group affiliations and the fact that she would be starting a federal clerkship in the fall. It quickly went viral, spreading through the Harvard Law community and among Black Law Student Associations at several top law schools, many of whose members sent it along to us at Above the Law. (Fuller back story on this here.)

If nothing else, it was certainly a lesson in being careful about what you say in emails.

What was of interest to us when we broke the story was the reaction on Harvard’s campus, the propriety of disseminating a private email, and the response from recipients of the email — some of whom suggested that her clerkship be taken from her. Engaged by those issues, we chose not to include the student’s name and instead called her by a pseudonym — “Crimson DNA.” Her identity did not seem integral to the story, and our policy, as we’ve stated before, is to maintain the anonymity of law students. We only name names if (a) the name is already mentioned in a public record (like a police report), OR (b) the name is already mentioned in a mainstream media outlet.

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To Truncate or Not to Truncate: An RSS Experiment

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Yesterday we made a decision to truncate the RSS feeds on AboveTheLaw for the next thirty days. RSS subscribers will get a headline and first paragraph, but will have to click to the site to get full stories.

AboveTheLaw.com's shortened RSS feedWe’re far from the first to do it. In fact just recently Gawker joined many more mainstream publishers like the WSJ and FT in truncating its feeds, much to the chagrin of Felix Salmon, who has written extensively on the topic. In our case, the move was prompted as much by my annoyance at the growing group of content thieves scraping our content via RSS (I dealt with two yesterday), as it was by a desire to get some commercial benefit from those readers. We’re a small company with limited resources, and I got fed up wasting valuable time trying to track down these parasites who aren’t only benefiting from our editors’ hard graft but also potentially messing with our search engine results by creating duplicates of our content on other sites.

I say “we” made the decision, but it was hardly unanimous. In fact, our executive editor here, Matt Creamer, bets it won’t work. Here’s an excerpt of an email he sent me on the topic:

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