After 20 years as the only weekly law publication in Rhode Island, Rhode Island Lawyers Weekly will have a competitor beginning Feb. 14. On that day the New York-based American Lawyer Media is putting out its inaugural issue of a weekly paper called Rhode Island Law Tribune.
According to Vincent Valvo, publisher and editor of Law Tribune Newspapers, the publication will go out to every licensed attorney and judge in Rhode Island without charge. Some law students will receive the paper free of charge also, but others wanting a subscription will have to pay $365 a year.
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American Lawyer Media publishes 25 different publications. Law Tribune Newspapers, which is its subsidiary, now publishes four, including The Western Massachusetts Law Tribune, The Tech Law Tribune (also in Connecticut), and The Boston Law Tribune.
The latter was spun out of a supplement that was included with The National Law Journal, called Massachusetts Edition.
“We did the Mass. report as a supplement and got such a good response that we broke it out on its own,” said Valvo. “We needed it to be run in its region, rather than as part of a national division.”
Valvo is confident the Rhode Island publication will stand up to its competition, Rhode Island Lawyers Weekly.
“We expect to very quickly be the dominant legal resource in the state,” he said.
“The major difference between us is that Rhode Island Lawyers Weekly goes out to a fraction and we hit the entire market,” said Valvo. “There are a good number of attorneys that cannot afford subscription prices.”
Jeffrey Baskies, president of Lawyers Weekly Publications, which publishes Rhode Island Lawyers Weekly among eight other publications, said he is not scared, that Rhode Island Lawyers Weekly goes out to 75 percent of the attorneys in Rhode Island, and subscriptions have recently reached a five-year high.
“Our paper is at its strongest point,” said Baskies, “and we expect and know it will continue to be as such.”
Robert Corrente, an a partner and a member of the litigation department of the Providence firm Hinckley, Allen & Snyder, and a former member of the Judicial Nominating Commission said he is interested to see how the Rhode Island Law Tribune will fare.
“I think that all lawyers would like to see more coverage of the kinds of cases or materials that they are involved in on a day to day basis,” he said, “but keeping in mind that Lawyers Weekly is trying to be a touch-all publication, I think they do a good job.”
“And I would be interested to see if another publication can do as well as Lawyers Weekly has done,” said Corrente, “Generally speaking when two papers are in town, it pushes both of them to do better.”
Baskies said a subscription to his publication is $255, and there are daily updates on the RI-Lawyersweekly.com Web site. Baskies, himself an attorney, also noted that ten to twelve of the people in the publication’s Rhode Island office are also attorneys.
Judith Kelliher has been hired as the editor for Rhode Island Law Tribune. Writing in the legal field since 1988, she spent six year covering the legal community in western Massachusetts for the Daily Hampshire Gazette, and three and a half years as deputy communications director for the Massachusetts Bar Association. She said she is looking forward to the competition.
“The opportunity to have another publication that covers the legal community is certainly a good one, and we hope to offer a good variety of court decisions, profiles and feature stories,” she said. “We’re just looking at it as a market where lawyers could use some legal information.”
Baskies said having an operation with attorneys writing and editing most of the material is what helps distinguish his company, and makes it vital to the legal community. A bulk of Rhode Island Lawyers Weekly includes weekly opinions from the courts, reviews of important cases and classified advertising.
“Basically, I think you’re looking at apples and oranges,” he said.
Valvo said many contributing writers for The Rhode Island Law Tribune would be attorneys and there will be an attorney on staff for counsel, but most of the staff members, including Kelliher, are journalists.
“I can say whenever we’ve gone and said we were coming to town, we’ve been warmly greeted,” said Valvo. “It does look like the market is eager for something new in the legal publishing arena.”
Kelliher said some issues might contain articles to those published in sister papers because there are issues that are not geographically constrained.
However, Valvo insisted, lawyers should not worry that his publication would simply be “cookie cutter” stories from the other Tribune publications.
“Any newspaper has to be a reflection of the local community,” he said. “Very little information is shared because the law is so different in each state.”
“But there are a lot of law firms that do business across borders,” said Valvo. “When Edwards & Angell does something, it’s sometimes of interest in Providence, in Boston and in Hartford.”
