The goal of Corporate Counsel is smart, timely, and authoritative coverage of the nexus between business and the law. Our motto is: "The business magazine for the chief legal officer." While staff reporters write our features and news articles, we do accept pieces from outside authors-primarily lawyers, consultants, and other specialists-for certain sections of the magazine. The Corporate Counsel sections open to contributed work are: Legal Manager (on issues related to managing a corporate law department and the legal function within a company and Outbox (humorous takes on the in-house lawyer's life). We also appreciate getting news of recent law department hires (and general counsel departures), which we cover in section called Moves.
Please acquaint yourself with the magazine before making a pitch. If you're not a subscriber, you can review the magazine's contents online at http://www.corpcounsel.com/. Do not write a whole article on spec. Instead, please send a query, via e-mail to editorial@amlaw.com or postal mail, to the address noted below. We prefer to receive pitches and queries in written form, not phone calls. Queries should explain the scope of the proposed piece and should be written in the style the lawyer will use in the article. Please do not send us bios or photos with your query for Legal Manager pieces. We'll request these if a piece is commissioned and accepted. For Moves items, simply e-mail us the press release. Please send releases on law department moves to editorial@amlaw.com, along with head shots at 300 dot-per-inch resolution and in .jpeg format. Communications representatives should note that it's almost always more effective if your client pitches a story himself or herself. Please give your client these guidelines, and encourage him or her get in touch with us via e-mail. We cannot promise to publish a piece based solely on a pitch, query, or outline, but we can save you time by letting you know whether the topic and approach are appropriate for us. We do not accept articles that have been previously published elsewhere, with the exception of pieces published in sibling periodicals also owned by American Lawyer Media. Even if we request that you write an article, based on a pitch, we cannot guarantee that it will be accepted or published. American Lawyer Media retains the copyright on all articles that we do accept and print.
Contributed articles run from 1,000 to 1,600 words-and never over 2,000. Please do not use footnotes or endnotes, and keep case citations to an absolute minimum. The tone should be journalistic (e.g., the style of The New York Times or Wall Street Journal not the style of law review articles). Please avoid legal terminology as much as you can. We will edit out any legalese or jargon specific to single sectors or industries. We like stories with a point of view. For lawyer-written pieces, this might be a lesson to be drawn from a series of cases, an unreported legal trend, or useful practical advice. We aren't after anything heavy-handed, but we do want more than a recitation of the case law. Please use topic sentences to summarize key points at the start of each paragraph. There's an art to making them read simply and elegantly. Work hard at them and on organization. Stories need to move through facts and arguments in some sort of logical order. Don't bury important points. The body of paragraphs should amplify the topic sentence. Use real-life examples; they'll bring your piece to life and will grab the reader's interest. Analogies and metaphors also enliven writing. Imagine a CEO called you into his office two weeks before trial and wanted you to summarize the major strengths and weaknesses of a case. Write the way you would talk to him.
We try to make every sentence as clear and succinct as possible. So, we smooth out bumps, eliminate detours, untangle knotty sentences, and clarify ambiguity. We often send stories back for further work. Please do not take it personally; it's just what we do. And we often query sentences or whole paragraphs. If something isn't clear to us, readers probably will not understand it either. We're not perfect. Sometimes we inadvertently introduce errors into drafts or confuse rather than clarify. Please read our edits carefully prior to publication, and let us know about any errors of fact or emphasis. Please submit information, releases, etc. to:
editorial@amlaw.com
Fax: 212-481-8255
