© 2015 The Texas Lawbook.
By Brooks Igo
(July 17) – In October 2011, The Texas Lawbook posted its first two articles. One was a profile of David Woodcock, who had just been sworn in as the new director of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission’s Fort Worth Regional Office. The second was an article on Fulbright & Jaworski’s Litigation Trends Survey.
The publication initially had no subscribers, no advertisers, no Twitter followers, no other content.
Forty-one months later, The Texas Lawbook has reached a major milestone. We now have more than 7,000 lawyers who are paid subscribers – about 1,700 of them are corporate in-house counsel. These are lawyers who practice business law (litigation, regulatory and transactional) in Texas.
“People thought I was seriously crazy to leave the comforts of a large law firm with the nice salary, cushy benefits and that corporate American Express card to start an online newspaper with no revenues and no readers,” said founder and senior writer Mark Curriden. “The truth is, we were not positive that the ‘build it and they will come’ approach would work.”
For the first three months of operation, articles on The Texas Lawbook website were free to read. As Mark put it, “Because we weren’t completely sure what we were doing, we didn’t think we should charge people for it.”
In late January 2012, The Texas Lawbook went behind a pay-wall, meaning a subscription was required to view our articles. It happened on a Saturday evening, when we thought no one was watching. But someone was.
That Saturday evening, at about 8:45 p.m., the first lawyer paid to read articles on The Texas Lawbook website. He wasn’t just any lawyer. He was Wayne Watts, general counsel of AT&T.
“The fact that Wayne Watts was our first subscriber is amazing and totally unexpected,” Curriden said. “Wayne is a dynamic thought leader in the legal profession. He has been a good friend of The Texas Lawbook.”
In the weeks and months that followed, nearly every major law firm operating in Texas purchased a group subscription for its lawyers.
Several corporate legal departments followed buying subscriptions for all their in-house lawyers and staff, including American Airlines, Approach Resources, AT&T, Breitburn Energy, Chevron, Classic Industries, Dean Foods, Denbury Resources, Energy Future Holdings, Energy Transfer Partners, Exxon Mobil, Fluor Corp., Interstate Batteries, Lennox Int’l, Mark Cuban Companies, Summit Midstream Partners, PepsiCo, Range Resources, Riverstone Holdings and Southwest Airlines.
The Texas Supreme Court and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit have group subscriptions for their judges and staff. Additionally, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has a subscription for its Fort Worth regional office.
“Our goal from the start was to publish unique, substantive articles that focused exclusively on lawyers who practice business law,” Curriden said. “That is still our guiding principle. We want to publish articles that inform lawyers about trends and developments in the legal profession.”
The Texas Lawbook has several new projects underway. For example, we will premiere a new column next week called the “GC Suite.” The column will be authored by corporate general counsel throughout Texas.
Stay tuned for more big announcements!
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