Staff
katrina@lawdragon.com | (310) 850-1718
Chief Executive Officer Katrina Dewey founded Lawdragon in 2005 to use the power of the Internet to provide free, high quality legal news to an infinite audience of people interested in the law. She is a leading advocate for greater transparency and openness in the law, which has been the defining goal of her 26 years in law and journalism.
Katrina transformed the Los Angeles Daily Journal from a traditional trade paper focused on delivering summaries of court decisions to a vibrant, award winning newspaper with a staff of 100 reporters, editors and photographers during her tenure as Editor from 1996 to 2005. During that time, the Daily Journal was recognized for its reporting on the abuse of children by Catholic priests, failures of the Los Angeles foster care system, abuses of immigrants in INS detention, political machinations in the judicial appointment process and failures of law firms. Daily Journal reporters were recognized with more awards than any other small newspaper in California under her leadership, including an unprecedented five consecutive “Journalist of the Year” awards.
She began her career at the Daily Journal in 1989, after briefly practicing law in Los Angeles. Though she had no journalism experience, her determination to become a reporter and write about lawyers and the law rather than practice it secured her an entry level job as a cub reporter. She quickly ascended the editorial ranks with her reporting on California law practice, including law firm dissolutions, mergers and layoffs. She established trademark Daily Journal lists, including Rainmakers and the Top 100. She also was a writer for and on the editorial advisory board of California Lawyer magazine and served as the editor of four weekly legal newspapers in Arizona, Colorado, Nevada and Washington.
While at the Daily Journal, she also founded Behind the Wall, a literacy and journalism volunteer effort at Camp Gonzales in Calabasas, Calif. She worked with juvenile detainees to write monthly newspapers about their lives before incarceration and during their detention.
Katrina is from Gibson City, a town of 3500 people in Central Illinois. She received her B.S. With honors in Economics from Illinois State University and her J.D from the University of Chicago Law School in 1986.
john@lawdragon.com | (646) 241-5427
John Ryan (www.johnjryan.com), Co-Founder and Editor-in-Chief, is an awarding-winning journalist with 20 years of experience in new media, print and film covering complex matters related to the criminal and civil justice systems, the law and business, and human rights and global justice issues. John runs Lawdragon’s day-to-day operations, overseeing all online and magazine content, website development and company branding. He also provides regular coverage from Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, on the military commissions against accused terrorists, including the case against the five alleged plotters of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. In 2019, he won a New York Press Club Award in Journalism for his coverage of the Sept. 11 case and was a Finalist in 2021 for Best News Reporting by the Society of Professional Journalist’s New York Chapter (The Deadline Club.)
Prior to joining Lawdragon, John was a reporter for the Los Angeles Daily Journal. The Los Angeles Press Club named him a “Print Journalist of the Year Finalist” all three years between 2003 and 2005 for his coverage of high-profile national issues, such as the war on terror, the drug war, political corruption, corporate fraud, film and music piracy and disparities in criminal sentencing, among many others. He also twice won the Los Angeles Press Club’s award for “Best Magazine Feature,” once for his coverage of a pro bono effort to overturn a murder sentence and once for his story on a major religious-discrimination dispute. The Press Club awarded him a “Best News Feature, Runner Up” distinction for his feature story on the legal-defense efforts on behalf of accused terrorists Zacarias Moussaoui and Yaser Hamdi.
John moved to New York in 2008 to lead Lawdragon’s east coast editorial outreach and eventual relocation. He has traveled to South Africa, The Hague, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Serbia and Rwanda to research how post-conflict societies forge accountability mechanisms for war crimes and other human rights abuses. Prior to entering journalism, John worked as a research fellow for a major arms control lobbying group in Washington, D.C. and as a researcher for a policy consulting firm. He has a MA in human rights studies from New York University and a BA from Colby College in Waterville, Maine.
carlton@lawdragon.com | (732) 407-2923
Vice President for Business Development, Carlton Dyce is a driven, results oriented leader with 30+ years of legal publishing experience and over 35 years of broad publishing experience covering customer experience strategies, business development and operations management.
Carlton’s experience includes: VP – CX and New Business at American Registry; GM of Martindale-Hubbell’s Lawyer Ratings group, VP Global Strategy for Martindale-Hubbell International and Sr. Director – MH Editorial and Customer Support. As head of the MH Lawyer Ratings group, he successfully launched their Top Lawyers Program which aligned the MH Lawyer ratings brand with Fortune magazine; American Lawyer Media and over 23 regional magazines across the country. For more than ten years, he supervised the production of the Martindale-Hubbell database, including data and directory development for Martindale.com and Lawyers.com, and he was instrumental in transitioning the editorial process from print-focused to web-focused.
Carlton has a proven track record of driving change and building business relationships all aimed at achieving visible results. He is among the most respectedbusiness executives in legal publishing and a hands on marketing machine. His experiences have provided him with a multicultural awareness and he communicates sensitively and efficiently across cultural divides.
Carlton holds an AA in Sales, a BA in Marketing and a MA in Organizational Management.
Memorable moments in Senior Editor James Langford’s career include walking underneath NASA’s shuttle Discovery as it prepared for a mission at Kennedy Space Center, interviewing R&B singer James Brown and navigating downtown New York City without the aid of traffic lights in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy. He has more than two decades of experience in print, digital and video platforms and has led coverage of financial markets and legal affairs for news organizations from FOX Business to TheStreet Inc. and Bloomberg News. James has a bachelor’s degree in journalism and marketing from the University of South Carolina-Aiken, and has won awards for investigative coverage of law enforcement and child welfare. His first reporting job was at The Augusta (Ga.) Chronicle, where he occasionally wrote about the Master’s Tournament but never actually set foot on the Augusta National’s grounds. He served on a jury for the first time in 2011. Follow him on Twitter @jayelang.
Michelle Fox is Lawdragon’s Web Services administrator. She handles client services and assists with creation and positioning of client profiles, as well as other web-related services. She is also an administrative contact for the Lawdragon lists. She is a graduate of the University of Southern California and worked as litigation paralegal for several large Los Angeles law firms.
Assistant Editor Emily Jackoway is a lover of language in all its facets. She is a writer for Lawdragon's Lawyer Limelight series, in which she frequently profiles members of the Lawdragon Hall of Fame. In that role, she utilizes her background in an array of storytelling capacities. Her experience includes writing for an internationally acclaimed literary education website, as well as creating and producing the site's podcast. Emily holds a BA in English Literature from New York University and a BFA in Theatre from NYU's Tisch School of the Arts. She finds interviewing lawyers to be an exciting fusion of the two disciplines.