U.S. Legal Publishing Continues to Move Overseas

Today ZiefBrief learned that Incisive Media, a U.K. company, has purchased  the venerable ALM (formerly American Lawyer Media), publisher of the American Lawyer, The Recorder (one of San Francisco's legal papers), the National Law Journal, and other well-regarded national and regional legal magazines and newspapers.

This may be a good thing for ALM, as Robert Ambrogi (our source for this tidbit), opines, but ZiefBrief can't help but be a little concerned about the ongoing flight of U.S. legal publishing. All major U.S. legal "imprints" are already foreign-owned. Thomson, the Canadian media giant, owns West and its many divisions; Reed-Elsevier, the Anglo-Dutch concern, owns LexisNexis and its kin; and Wolters-Kluwer of the Netherlands owns CCH. The last holdout among major publishers is the employee-owned BNA (Bureau of National Affairs), and we wonder if ALM will be just the first of many smaller publishers to be cherry-picked by foreign corporations.

Realistically there is no danger in having all of our law published abroad. (Though heaven forbid that we should ever mortally offend Canada, the U.K. or the Netherlands and awake one morning to find, in searching the Constitution via Westlaw or Lexis, that we are now ruled by Her Majesty Queen Beatrix  or Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth!) Still, on an emotional level, it strikes us that law is somehow akin to a nation's cultural patrimony and it seems odd that so little of ours is in the hands of domestic companies.