Fastcase acquires legal news company Law Street Media
Legal research company Fastcase has purchased Law Street Media, a legal news site, marking an entrance into the media market.
Announced on Tuesday on the Fastcase website, Law Street will be retooled and relaunched in the second quarter of 2019 to highlight national and state legal news complemented by analytics powered by Fastcase’s legal information products.
“Legal research isn’t just about logging into an online service and running searches,” said Fastcase CEO Ed Walters in a statement. “Lawyers have to stay as informed as their clients, and our partnership with Law Street Media will be an important source of must-have information about the fast-changing practice of law.”
Walters declined to share the cost of the acquisition. However, he did say that beyond the URL, the acquisition includes a built-in readership—which he said is in the range of hundreds of thousands of page views a year—the company’s search engine optimization and its reach across various social platforms. He says that this was better than starting from scratch.
“Now we don’t have to start at square one,” he tells the ABA Journal. “We can start at square eight.”
Focusing on millennial lawyers and law students, Law Street Media was founded in 2013 by John Jenkins. Jenkins was previously the president and publisher of CQ Press, which focuses on government and politics.
The current incarnation of Law Street has the tagline “Law & Policy for Our Generation” and a navigation bar with the following categories: news, crime, issues, blogs, schools, cannabis and videos. While the media site has made handful of posts in the last week, the most recently posted article prior to that was from August 2017. There are about 5,000 posts on the site.
Walters says that his goal with the company is to expand it beyond a millennial base.
This marks the second acquisition this year by Fastcase, founded in 1999. This spring the company purchased Docket Alarm, a legal research and litigation prediction tool.
“Lawyers already get their news from Fastcase’s research alerts, and Docket Alarm is itself named after its alerting service,” Walters said in his press statement. “We can’t wait to explore the legal news potential from telling these stories in Law Street Media.”
