Legal publishing and media watchers will be interested in the news that industry giant Thomson Reuters has acquired Super Lawyers.
The deal was announced on February 2 2010.
No word on deal value, but I suspect Super Lawyers was more profitable than most people imagine – even in the teeth of the recession.
While Thomson Reuters has been hoovering up everything in the legal world in the last few years, this is still an intriguing move.
It is something of a vindication for the energetic Super Lawyers publisher Bill White who has fought the Minneapolis-based company’s corner valiantly against a wall of BigLaw skepticism.
A ubiquitous fixture on the US legal media scene, White and his team have had to fend off an onslaught from harassed law firm marketing directors creaking under the weight of a growing pile of surveys, as well as bar association busybodies who took umbrage at the company’s methodology.
Linking up with Thomson Reuters’ other key legal search site, FindLaw, will be an obvious move.
But, perhaps with one eye on the attention-grabbing Best Lawyers-US News tie-up, let’s see whether Thomson Reuters sticks to Super Lawyers’ core plaintiff firm clientele, or use its muscle to make commercial inroads into the larger full-service firms.
[…] February 2010, Super Lawyer owner Key Professional Media was acquired by legal publishing giant Thomson […]