2020 Azbee Awards of Excellence

Category

Design > Front Cover-Photo > Less Than $3 Million Revenue > Upper Midwest

Awarded to

Benjamin Hager, Photographer; Brenan Sharp, Design Director

Entry details

10 Years of Legal Rebels

Issue or publication date: September-October 2019
Publication name: ABA Journal
Publishing company: American Bar Association
Website home page: ABAJournal.com

Please describe the publication's mission and readership:

The ABA Journal is the flagship magazine for the American Bar Association and signature publication for the legal profession. The Journal is an award-winning, dynamic multimedia platform delivering legal journalism with an independent voice. The Journal informs, engages and stimulates important conversations that define the American legal system and help it respond to important issues of the day. The Journal and its companion website, newsletters and podcasts ensure it has among the largest readership of any legal publication in the world. While the Journal serves as a key benefit to members of the American Bar Association, it maintains editorial independence and integrity, allowing it to provide critical coverage of the trends, people and business of the legal profession from Wall Street to Main Street to Pennsylvania Avenue.

Please describe the enterprising work that went into this entry and its significance or impact on readers:

The ABA Journal's largest and most popular annual editorial enterprise, Legal Rebels, turned 10 years old in 2019. Once again, we went all over the country to get the best portraits of our honorees. Despite some excellent photography of all of our candidates, we decided the strong, self-assured portrait of first-generation Mexican immigrant, Aydé Soto, by photographer Benjamin Hager was the shot we wanted to celebrate a decade of innovation within the law. Additionally, the timeliness of her personal story—along with that of her cofounders—made our selection of this image a simple one. Stemming from their mutual dissatisfaction with legal representation during their individual processes of immigration by marriage, Soto and her team created software company SimpleCitizen, which provides prospective citizens a more expedient means of filling out all the paperwork. By doing so, they've truly democratized an otherwise overly laborious process. This service is available for just $249 and they even provide legal counsel to review your application for another $99. The selection of this photo of a non-lawyer immigrant who streamlined the immigration process for her clients by minimizing lawyer involvement as the cover is, therefore, inherently rebellious. In fact, this cover best exemplifies the Legal Rebels premise. In selecting each Rebel, we never shy away from certain topics despite the potential of such a story being socially inflammatory, and, more importantly, we choose to spotlight unknown heroes quietly making a difference in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds. Legal Rebels identify a problem and provide a solution.

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