2016 Azbee Awards of Excellence
Category
Print > Impact/Investigative > Northeast
Awarded to
Susan Beck, Senior Writer
Entry details
Big Law and Legal Aid
Issue date (if applicable): 7/1/2015
Publication name: The American Lawyer
Publishing company: ALM
Website home page: www.americanlawyer.com
Please describe the publication's mission and readership:
The American Lawyer - We cover the largest law firms in the nation. Lawyers who practice in those megafirms, essentially the legal defense establishment, make up the bulk of our audience. We are also read by the lawyers who hire those firms, typically chief legal officers at Fortune 500 companies; the lawyers who compete with those firms, such as the feisty plaintiffs lawyers who sue the Fortune 500; and the lawyers who either have fled those firms or aspire to build a megafirm of their own. Our audience can find technical help about specific laws from many professional journals; they look to us for legal news and its context, insightful analysis of data and trends, and independent reporting on their business and people.
Please describe the enterprising work that went into this entry and its significance or impact on readers:
It's never been a better time to be a partner at a big law firm: Revenues and profits have never been higher, and firms staff matters with armies of lawyers in offices across the globe. It's also never been a harder time to be a legal-aid lawyer, making do with less after years of funding cutbacks while facing a recession-generated surge in caseload. The result is a classic story of inequality: A hedge fund or corporation gets the best defense money can buy, while the poor get vastly inferior representation, if they can get it at all. American Lawyer senior writer Susan Beck set out to both document this "justice gap" and discover what the nation's richest law firms are doing to close it. The answer: not much. Large firms contribute, at best, 0.1 percent, of their revenues to legal aid donations, Beck found, while lavishing charitable contributions and pro bono hours on larger, better-heeled nonprofits that are favorites of clients or individual partners.
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Big Law and Legal Aid
Category
Print > Impact/Investigative > Northeast
Description
Publication name:
The American Lawyer
Company:
ALM
Winner Status
- Regional Silver Award
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