When I joined The American Lawyer 16 years ago, I didn’t know much about large law firms. Nor did my new boss, Bill Pollak, who had joined ALM from the publishing side of The New York Times. Of course, we had friends from college and law school who had disappeared into Big Law, but we knew little of their business structures or daily work. So, like any minimally competent business executive or lead editor would do, we set out to meet our new audience and launched our so-many-lawyers, so-little-time national tour. Three of those meetings still ring in my memory and set the course for my tenure here.
The first was with one of the old bulls of the West Coast legal scene. He spent a chunk of our lunch offering a ritual denunciation of The American Lawyer for “ruining the profession” by publishing the Am Law 100 financial report each year. After listening for a while, I asked what he would suggest we do instead. He paused and said, I’d like you to judge us on the merits of our work, identify innovative lawyering and report on that. Okay, I said, we can try, but it would help if you would give me an example of some innovative work at your firm. I thought this was a softball question, but it seemed to stump him. Well, he said finally, one of our young partners invented a timber REIT up north. As he described it, painfully, all I could think was dear God, was there still time for me to return to Newsweek?
