© 2017 The Texas Lawbook.
By Mark Curriden
(Jan. 2) – Prominent legal and investigative journalist Allen Pusey is joining The Texas Lawbook as a senior editor and writer starting today.
Pusey retired in December as the editor and publisher of the ABA Journal, which is the nation’s largest circulation legal publication. Before his decade with the Journal, Pusey spent 26 years as a reporter and editor at The Dallas Morning News, where he was a special projects editor and covered the Supreme Court of the United States.
“Texas is in the midst of redefining itself in the business universe, and the legal profession is a vital part of that,” he says. “With the steady decline in resources of the more traditional press, a niche has emerged that The Texas Lawbook is ready to fill. TLB is not only covering the legal and regulatory issues being sorted out by Texas lawyers, but, as near as I can tell, it is pretty much defining the competition between them.”
A long-suffering Texas Rangers fan, Pusey provides a unique perspective in that he has covered lawyers and legal issues on a local level in Dallas and on a national and even international scale at the ABA Journal.
In 2000, he co-authored a series of articles with me while we worked together at The Dallas Morning News about the declining number of jury trials in Texas and across the U.S. As part of the project, Pusey unveiled data showing that Latinos were significantly under-represented in the Dallas County jury pools. Those articles led the state of Texas to increase the amount of money it pays jurors from $6 a day to $40 in order to increase public participation in the jury system.
“Texas is very much like other states – only more so,” he says. “The struggle, particularly for business lawyers, is to keep up with the increasing commoditization of what used to be money-making legal chores, an increasingly sophisticated regulatory climate and, frankly, the demand by clients for clear accountability for their legal spend.”
Pusey attended Davidson College in North Carolina before joining the U.S. Army and serving in Vietnam. He later graduated from the University of Texas-Dallas with a degree in sociology.
“I started my career in El Paso and I’m old enough to have witnessed the great arc of journalism from its pre-Watergate days to the frenzied information marketplace we have now,” he says. “Daily newspapers were forced to change. Magazines were forced to change. And the public presence of journalism is redefining itself from the business side out.
“But so is the legal industry, and I find myself wanting to witness all that from a new perspective,” he says. “Mark and his staff have created something new for Texas lawyers, and I think that’s something important to BOTH professions. I think that’s exciting. Why wouldn’t someone with my background want to be a part of that?”
The Texas Lawbook welcomes Allen Pusey to our team. He can be contacted at allen.pusey@texaslawbook.net.
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