Media and Journalism, Technology

This Week In Legal Tech: Lawyers Learn To Love The Podcast

Tech columnist Bob Ambrogi discusses some of his favorite legal podcasts.

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radio microphone mic mike podcast podcastingI’ve just returned from the Academy for Private Practice in Philadelphia, an Above the Law-produced conference on starting and optimizing a small firm practice. In the conference’s exhibit hall, conspicuously located in the center, was a table on which were arrayed various pieces of recording equipment and a bank of microphones. Throughout the day, conference speakers and others came and went from this table, sitting for 10 to 20 minutes, alone or in groups, to be interviewed for the Legal Talk Network.

If you’ve attended a major legal conference in the past couple years, you may have seen this same sight. The Legal Talk Network (LTN) folks have made it common practice to set up their recording equipment at all sorts of legal conferences, recording brief segments with speakers and other interview-worthy attendees for their podcast series appropriately called On the Road.

The LTN’s seeming ubiquity is a visible sign of something that has firmly taken hold in the legal profession: Lawyers have learned to love the podcast. I was going to go so far as to title this post, “The Golden Age of Legal Podcasting,” until a Google search revealed a glut of stories declaring podcasting’s golden age and disabused me of that idea.

I credit the LTN for having helped prime the podcasting pump for lawyers. It has been producing legal podcasts since 2005. I can attest to that because Lawyer 2 Lawyer, the show J. Craig Williams and I cohost, was LTN’s first podcast, launched August 31, 2005, and today is the longest continually running legal podcast. In the years since, the LTN has lived up to its “network” name, launching a diverse line-up of professional-quality shows (including Above the Law’s Thinking Like A Lawyer and my other podcast Law Technology Now).

Until recently, podcasting’s foothold among lawyers had been slippery. The first legal podcast, I believe, was The Law and IT, which launched on September 2, 2004. (Host Ernest Miller has since left the law to work as a chef, per his LinkedIn profile.) Another early podcast was the Bag and Baggage Podcast, which California lawyer Denise Howell debuted on January 9, 2005. Two days later came the Legal Underground podcast, in which lawyer Evan Schaeffer “plugged my drum machine into my digital recorder, hooked up my guitar, … and read from Black’s Law Dictionary.” Because the Internet never forgets, Evan’s recording lives on.

Between then and now, podcasting’s popularity waxed and waned, both among lawyers and the public at large. By 2008, the early legal podcasts had muted their microphones. A 2008 Information Week column asked, Is Podcasting Dead? But then came Serial in 2014, the true-crime series that was the most popular podcast ever and that cemented podcasting’s place as a medium to take seriously.

So while “golden age” may be hackneyed, legal podcasts have indisputably come into their own. The LTN’s shows – of which its website lists 36 – are just the tip of the legal podcasting iceberg. I hesitate to call out any show, for fear of offending all the great shows I do not mention. But outside the LTN’s line-up, you’ll find shows such as Denise Howell’s This Week in Law (with video as well as audio); Radiolab Presents: More Perfect, which tells the stories behind key Supreme Court cases (and includes ATL editor Elie Mystal as a contributor); and The Life of the Law, a series of biweekly investigative reports on law.

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Others worth checking out include Legal Current, a Thomson Reuters podcast on the business and practice of law; Bloomberg Law, the company’s eponymous show analyzing legal issues and cases in the news; The Lawyerist Podcast, a show about lawyering and law practice; and Amicus, Slate writer Dahlia Lithwick’s show about the Supreme Court. I could go on and on.

The best way to sample the diversity of legal podcasts is to go to the iTunes store and search terms such as “law,” “legal” and “lawyer,” and then narrow the results to podcasts. You will find an abundance of interesting-sounding shows. Then just dive in and start listening – on your commute, while you’re exercising, or whenever. Once you get hooked, you may end up starting a podcast of your own.

Robert Ambrogi is a Massachusetts lawyer and journalist who has been covering legal technology and the web for more than 20 years, primarily through his blog LawSites.com. Former editor-in-chief of several legal newspapers, he is a fellow of the College of Law Practice Management and an inaugural Fastcase 50 honoree. He can be reached by email at ambrogi@gmail.com, and you can follow him on Twitter (@BobAmbrogi).

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