The 2027 Lawdragon 100 Leading Legal Journalists

Lawyers are trained to keep confidences. Journalists are trained to find the story. The reporters, editors and columnists on this list have built careers covering a profession that would, on the whole, rather not be covered – and the legal industry is better for it.

The record speaks for itself. When Dewey & LeBoeuf began to unravel in 2012, it was reporters who first noticed that the numbers did not add up. When Weil, Gotshal & Manges began losing partners this autumn, the legal press tracked every departure and every failed merger talk in real time, weeks before management recommended a wind-down. In between came leaked Supreme Court opinions, judicial misconduct, Ponzi schemes run from law offices, billing scandals and unprecedented Executive Orders targeting Big Law. Without the journalists here, much of that would have stayed behind closed doors, or surfaced only when it was too late to matter.

A word on who you won’t find. Lawdragon has journalists of its own, and some of them are rather good. Modesty, and a healthy respect for conflicts of interest, prevents us from naming any of them. You’ll have to take our word for it.

Chris Opfer leads business of law news at Bloomberg Industry Group, and few desks have been busier in the past two years. His team at Bloomberg Law has been relentless on the Trump administration’s executive orders against law firms. It reported on both the firms that settled and the firms that fought, and on the cost to their partners and clients. This autumn the same team set the pace on the Weil story. It was first to report Weil’s merger talks with Willkie Farr & Gallagher, then their collapse days later, then the decision to wind down a 95-year-old institution. Opfer joined Bloomberg BNA in 2012 as a legal editor. He went on to report from Capitol Hill and served as deputy team lead for labor and employment news before taking charge of the business of law beat. Unusually for a journalist, he also brings a lawyer’s eye to the work, having spent time as a trial attorney at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

Sara Randazzo joined Reuters in April to write a new column on the business and power dynamics of the legal profession, an apt brief for someone who has spent much of her career following the money. At The Wall Street Journal she covered the business of law, legal industry trends and the profession’s biggest personalities, and more recently education. Before that she reported on bankruptcies for Dow Jones’ Daily Bankruptcy Review and the Journal’s Bankruptcy Beat blog. Earlier still she was a staff reporter at The Am Law Daily. There she covered the long aftermath of the Dewey collapse, including the clawback claims pursued against former partners, along with the fees Big Law earned from Detroit’s bankruptcy. She began her career at the Daily Journal. That combination of law firm economics and insolvency expertise has rarely been more relevant than it is right now.

Josh Gerstein is a senior legal affairs reporter at Politico and the co-author, with Alex Ward, of one of the most consequential legal scoops in recent times. On May 2, 2022, Politico published Justice Samuel Alito’s 98-page draft majority opinion overturning Roe v. Wade, weeks before the Court issued its final decision. The leak of a full draft was virtually without precedent. The story led to a Pulitzer Prize finalist citation in breaking news reporting and helped usher in a more aggressive, accountability-minded era of Supreme Court coverage. (Ward now covers National Security at the Wall Street Journal). Gerstein has since covered the criminal cases against Donald Trump and the collisions between law, politics and power that define this moment. His career spans CNN’s investigative unit, ABC News, where he was White House and China correspondent and reported from Afghanistan for Nightline, and The New York Sun. He was a resident fellow at Harvard’s Institute of Politics in 2024.

We are delighted that this inaugural guide is sponsored by TLG Communications, and our grateful thanks go to them for their support in recognizing the journalists who chronicle our profession with rigor, curiosity, and care.

The Lawdragon 100 Leading Legal Journalists recognizes reporters, editors, podcasters and columnists across the trade press, the wires, national newspapers and independent newsletters and blogs. Selection was based on nominations, which we asked to include evidence of stories broken and career histories, together with our own research and conversations with lawyers, general counsel and fellow journalists. We look forward to building on this first edition in the years ahead.