Reflections Of An Editor Emeritus: Above The Law, 2006-2019
As I hang up my keyboard as an active ATL editor, I reflect upon the site and its evolution over time.
Thirteen years is a long time. In 2006, George W. Bush was president, John G. Roberts was a brand-new chief justice, and the Biglaw starting salary was $145,000. It seems like ancient history, doesn’t it?
And in 2006, Above the Law officially launched. On August 30 of the year, I published the site’s first post from a spare room — not a legal bedroom, no windows — in my apartment in the Logan Circle neighborhood of Washington, D.C. I was ATL’s founding editor (and only editor, until I was joined in 2008 by Elie Mystal).
Over the years, Above the Law grew from a scrappy, irreverent, gossipy legal blog into one of the nation’s largest and most influential legal news websites. Today it’s based in New York, which I call home now as well, and owned by Breaking Media, the leading publisher of websites and social-media channels for influential, affluent business communities. ATL has a dozen or so full-time employees, who work out of actual offices in Manhattan, and around 50 outside columnists, generally practicing lawyers or other legal professionals who work for the site on an independent basis.
In 2017, after my husband and I welcomed our son into the world, I stepped down as managing editor and handed over the reins of ATL to my longtime colleague, Elie Mystal. What happened next? In 2018, the site enjoyed record traffic and revenue.
With Above the Law in good hands, I felt comfortable taking my leave. As I just announced, after almost 13 years as an editor of Above the Law (managing editor from 2006 to 2017 and editor at large from 2017 to 2019), I’ve become a legal recruiter and joined Lateral Link, a longtime advertiser of ATL (the first, in fact). As a managing director in the New York office, I will focus on placing top associates, partners, and partner groups into preeminent law firms around the country.
As mentioned in my departure post, I will remain involved with Above the Law as “Editor Emeritus” (not to be confused with “Partner Emeritus” or “PE,” for those of you have been reading ATL long enough to get the reference). I’ll write a column that will appear every other week on Tuesday (you’re reading the inaugural one), participate in ATL events, and assist with select editorial and sponsored projects. I will also still write for other publications and speak at law firms, at firm-wide retreats, partner retreats, summer associate events, and diversity initiatives.
But now that I’m officially “retired” as a full-time Above the Law editor (and full-time journalist), I thought this might be a good time to offer some reflections on ATL’s history to date. The past 13 years have witnessed major changes in both law and media, and ATL has evolved accordingly (which explains why, knock wood, the site remains successful and vibrant today). The site’s history offers an interesting window into how Biglaw and the legal profession more generally have changed over the last decade and a half.
I’ve divided up the development of Above the Law into two-year periods that reflect the focus of ATL at the time. The periods overlap because they’re far from clean or tidy; I’m no historian, but I think it’s fair to say that history is messy and complex, resisting efforts to impose excessive order on it.
2006-2008: Let The Good Times Roll
When new websites launch, they need to find a way to put themselves on the map. ATL did this partly through legal gossip — which the site still covers (better than any other outlet), although much less than it did in the early days — and partly through covering Biglaw stories and trends in a more detailed and granular way than had been done in the past.
The first major Biglaw story that ATL used to build an audience inside large law firms: the Simpson Thacher pay raise, announced in January 2007, which took starting salaries from $145,000 to $160,000. The traditional way to cover Biglaw pay raises was to publish one story about the first mover and then maybe, months later, a wrap-up of which firms had matched. The ATL way to cover Biglaw pay raises was to write up each and every announcement, in real time — which we discovered, from monitoring our website traffic, was an approach that resonated with readers. (It remains ATL’s approach to covering pay raises and bonuses; you can sign up for the salary and bonus news alerts here.)
2008-2010: It Was The Worst Of Times, It Was The Worst Of Times
But every boom — including the one we’re currently enjoying — gets followed by a bust. In fall 2008, the stock market crashed, Lehman Brothers collapsed, and if you were unfortunate enough to be going through on-campus interviewing at the time, your chances of landing a post as a summer associate dropped overnight. (One reason why OCI now starts in the summer is because certain top schools, haunted by the memory of fall 2008, moved up their on-campus recruiting schedules — and then everyone else followed suit.)
From 2008 to 2010, the Great Recession hit Biglaw — hard. And once again, ATL was there to cover the news that mattered in the lives of its readers — except this time, instead of pay raises and bonuses, the news was layoffs, pay freezes, dissolutions, and deferrals. Bad news, to be sure, but important news that people needed to know. I’m proud of the role that ATL played in keeping lawyers and law students informed during these dark days (a role we would later reprise when Dewey & LeBoeuf collapsed in 2011-2012, and employees relied upon us for information that their own management wouldn’t give them).
2010-2012: Please, For The Love Of God, Don’t Go To Law School
The collapse of legal employment eventually made itself felt in a collapse in law school enrollment. And this collapse was driven in part by harsh media coverage, much of it from ATL, of law schools whose graduates incurred six figures of (nondischargeable) debt for the privilege of not passing the bar and not finding employment as lawyers. The horrors of law school were a dominant theme of ATL’s pages during this time (reflected in how our Law Schools category page was the most popular category page for 2010-2012; in most years, ATL’s top category page is Biglaw).
Much of ATL’s discussion of legal education at this time was, well, scathing. As someone who tries to be “nice” (which I hope will serve me well in my new career as a recruiter), I sometimes felt uncomfortable with the tone taken by some of my colleagues (mostly Elie), and occasionally I’d try to pen half-hearted apologias.
But in hindsight, I must admit that Elie was mostly right. Many of these schools deserved to be taken to the woodshed. And the critiques of legal education — from Elie Mystal and others, including Kyle McEntee of the invaluable Law School Transparency and Professor Paul Campos of the University of Colorado (ATL’s Lawyers of the Year for 2010 and 2011, respectively) — drove reform in the academy. They led to heightened disclosure requirements from law schools, brought about greater transparency in legal education, and yielded more-informed and realistic decisions about whether to go to law school.
(The core criticism of law schools in this period — too much tuition, too much debt, too few jobs — is also what led us to create the ATL Law School Rankings. The ATL rankings, unlike certain other rankings, focus on two key factors — employment outcomes, and costs/debt — and they’ve been wildly popular with pre-law and law students since their launch in 2013.)
2012-2014: Identity and Ideology
As reflected in the Democratic primary contest for the 2020 presidential nomination, we live in an age dominated by identity and ideology. It might feel like a new age, but it has been gaining steam for several years now.
Above the Law is similarly focused on these issues — and has been for years. ATL has been a prominent voice for greater diversity in the legal profession for a long time — and has modeled diversity as well. Until my departure, the site’s full-time editors consisted of a gay Asian (me), an African-American (Elie Mystal), two women (Staci Zaretsky and Kathryn Rubino), and Joe Patrice, whom we jokingly referred to as “our token straight white male.”
ATL has a vertical and a podcast, The Jabot, focused on the issues and experiences of women and minorities in the law. The Jabot launched in 2017, but I date the site’s focus on issues of identity and ideology to the 2012-2014 period (or maybe even earlier).
If you look at ATL’s top stories for 2012 and 2013, you’ll see a number of them relate to issues of gender and race. Also in 2013, the Black Lives Matter movement launched — and Elie Mystal became (and remains) one of the nation’s leading voices on the intersection of race and the law.
The 2013 Lawyer of the Year award went to Robbie Kaplan, then at Paul Weiss and now at Kaplan Hecker & Fink, the first LGBT individual and second woman (after Justice Sonia Sotomayor in 2009) to take home this honor. Kaplan won in large part because of her history-making win in United States v. Windsor that year, which struck down the Defense of Marriage Act — and in 2014, fueled by Windsor, marriage equality came to one state after another.
Not everyone loves this heightened focus on identity and ideology, and when I was an editor at ATL, I’d often hear from readers who longed for less partisan days. And given my own fairly moderate political views, I was sometimes uncomfortable with the extremes.
But news outlets exist in specific cultural and political climates, which they both affect and are affected by. And given the larger trends in American discourse towards ideological polarization and emphasis on identity, ATL’s shift on this score was inevitable, for better or worse.
2014-2016: The Rise of the Machines
Above the Law is most well known for Biglaw industry news, along with a soupçon of humor and gossip. Many of our readers don’t know that ATL is also one of the top outlets, if not the top outlet, for coverage of legal technology, startups, and innovation. And given the way that technology is transforming the legal sector, lawyers and law students ignore legal tech at their peril.
I date the start of ATL’s serious focus on tech to the launch of Joe Borstein and Ed Sohn’s alt.legal column in 2014. In the years that followed, ATL added more and more writers and resources to cover legal tech, including Robert Ambrogi, the dean of tech-focused legal journalism. This all eventually culminated in ATL’s acquisition of Evolve Law, which is now Evolve the Law, ATL’s Legal Innovation Center.
2016-2018: Biglaw Is Back, Baby
This age is easy to explain: NY to 180! in 2016, courtesy of Cravath. And then — finally, after years of it being a joke meme — NY to 190! in 2018, thanks to Milbank.
Despite the increased overhead associated with higher salaries, Biglaw continued to boom. Law firm revenues and profits hit record highs in 2018, as reflected in the latest Am Law 100 rankings.
But as we all know, nothing lasts forever. See the discussion of the Great Recession, supra.
2019 and beyond: ?
What does the future hold for the legal profession and the world of law? I don’t know — and anyone who claims to know is foolish.
But what I do know is that no matter what the future brings, Above the Law will be there to cover it. I’m profoundly proud as its founder, and I’m deeply grateful to all the readers, writers, editors, and sponsors who have brought ATL to this point — and who will ensure that it will continue to thrive in the years ahead.
Earlier:
David Lat, the founding editor of Above the Law, is a writer, speaker, and legal recruiter at Lateral Link, where he is a managing director in the New York office. David’s book, Supreme Ambitions: A Novel (2014), was described by the New York Times as “the most buzzed-about novel of the year” among legal elites. David previously worked as a federal prosecutor, a litigation associate at Wachtell Lipton, and a law clerk to Judge Diarmuid F. O’Scannlain of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. You can connect with David on Twitter (@DavidLat), LinkedIn, and Facebook, and you can reach him by email at dlat@laterallink.com.
