Thomson Reuters acquires Super Lawyers
Feb 2nd, 2010 by Mark Cohen
Thomson Reuters today announced that it has acquired the lucrative Super Lawyers Franchise from Minneapolis-based Key Professional Media, headed by Minneapolis attorney Vance Opperman. Terms of the Super Lawyers deal were not disclosed.
UPDATE: Key is discontinuing Law & Politics, the irreverent magazine that has served the state’s legal and political communities since the early 1990s.
Imagine life for law grads in this state WITHOUT Thomson Reuters (West).
Apparently it wouldn’t be “super.”
I think the strategy here is to give Thomson Reuters and Findlaw an apples-to-apples challenge to Lexis AV ratings. So now Lexis has lawyers.com and AV, and Thomson has findlaw.com and SuperLawyers. Seems like a smart move, and if you have flipped through a recent Law & Politics, you could tell something was up. Sort of a ‘blink and you miss it’ publication for the last year or so.
Or I guess maybe I’m supposed to say all the clever writing on the MN Lawyer blog drove them out of business…. if it hasn’t been said before, then I’ll say it: I think Mark Cohen is the Matt Drudge of the MN Legal Scene.
Err, thanks? Can’t say that comparison has been made before (or is likely to be made since). Although handy dandy Wikipedia (and would Wikipedia ever lie?) tells me that Drudge finished near the bottom of his high school class, never went to college and now makes millions of dollars a year from his Drudge Report. Just imagine how much he could be making if he had had the good sense to go to law school? …
As for strategy in the Super Lawyers aquisition, I think that’s exactly right. West (Thomson/ Reuters, Findlaw, whatever you want to call it) wants to be in the lucrative ratings business. Super Lawyers is a good way in.
As for L&P, it was getting thinner near the end (and went biweekly a few years ago), I suspect because Key was channeling resources to the cash cow, Super Lawyers, with all the advertorial those “magazines” entail. Unfortunate, but understandable given the economics. Bill W., Steve K. and Adam W. all have a lot of obvious talent. Apparently Adam is going to West. Perhaps Bill and Steve will start a Minnesota “Drudge Report”?