This morning we announced in both New York and Washington our plan to merge the National Law Journal and Legal Times. David Brown, who has done an outstanding job as editor/publisher of LT, will return to NY to become the Editor-in-Chief of the NLJ, building on his prior experiences as an editor at both The Recorder and The American Lawyer.

By way of background, this is one of those projects which has been talked about for many years but, for one reason or another, we could never implement. Of all of our publications, the NLJ and Legal Times were the closest we had to internal competitors when ALM was put together in 1997. Both were founded in the late 1970's (at around the same time that The American Lawyer was launched). And for many years prior to 1997 the respective owners--Steve Brill for LT and Jimmy Finkelstein for the NLJ--battled for primacy in the national weekly legal news market. I will never forget my first meeting in 1998 as a newcomer to the company with the editors of those publications--my pep talk about all of us now working for the same team did not go over very well. Luckily for me, things got better in the following years.

For the last ten years we have worked hard to define each newspaper's turf--with LT focusing on inside-the-beltway coverage and the NLJ more attuned to the mid-size firm marketplace generally, and litigation specifically, across the country. Both produced outstanding journalism and, when the economy was good, acceptable profit margins. Steve Fromm and his predecessor at the NLJ, Rex Bossert, deserve a great deal of credit for helping the NLJ to understand its audience and develop a publication that truly met their needs.

Why, after all these years, have we decided that now is the time to merge these two newspapers? Two reasons. First of all, the fall-off in the economy and particularly the dramatic decline in recruitment advertising has had a devastating impact on Legal Times. Maintaining LT as a stand-alone, self-supporting newspaper would have required significant cost reduction and would have almost certainly had an impact on the quality of our journalism. That possibility was intolerable to us and so we went looking for a solution that would allow us to maintain our journalistic ambitions in DC but supported by a different business model.

The second reason for merging now is that the legal story out of DC has changed. More and more, that DC legal story--particularly as it relates to the major law firms, courts and legislative branch--is really a national story. Yes, readers inside-the-beltway may be interested in goings on in the Justice Department, but so are readers in California and Florida. Enhancing its Washington coverage will benefit the NLJ's readers and make that a significantly better newspaper.

Rather than quietly develop a full-blown plan and then announce it as a fait accompli, we decided to let the staff of both newspapers know today about the decision to merge, and then work together with them to develop the plan. Our intention is to launch the newly merged NLJ/Legal Times in early May. Between now and then, David and the NLJ's publisher, Steve Lincoln, will work with the staff of both newspapers to make the decisions about how many people will be needed in DC, NY and elsewhere, what it will take to merge the websites, and how the different news and business functions will be handled. We intend to maintain the Legal Times brand name both within the new NLJ and as the banner under which our local conferences and roundtables will be held.

I'm looking forward to taking these two wonderful newspapers and turning them into a single publication with more journalistic strength than either had before, supported by a more stable business model.

Here's the link to the press release we put out this morning: http://tr.im/hqni