15 legal Substacks worth your time

It's my great pleasure to return the compliment of a Substack Recommendation and direct your attention to these terrific legal newsletters.

Sometime last week, one of you marvellous people became the 2,000th subscriber to this newsletter since it launched last March. I’m grateful to all of you, from Subscriber #1 onwards, for your continued interest — I’ll publish a “State of the Substack” on or around the one-year anniversary of March 21 with an update on what I’ve written so far and what I have in mind for Year 2.

I’ve also been very fortunate to receive the endorsement of several other legal Substacks since I started out — but I’ve also been ridiculously late in acknowledging these recommendations and thanking their authors. So this is a quick post today to do exactly that.

I’m grateful to have received recommendations from no fewer than 17 law-related Substacks in 10 different countries. One of those is no longer publishing and another is entirely private, so that leaves me with 15 active public newsletters to bring to your attention. I appreciate every one of these Substacks, but I’m going to highlight five in particular that I really enjoy and that I’m confident you will, too.

In alphabetical order, they are:

1. Daniel's in-house legal newsletter, by Daniel Van Binsbergen, CEO at Lexoo, London. “One useful insight, idea or framework for in-house lawyers, every week.”
   —> Recommended post: Receiving feedback hurts

2. Durant’s Rants, by Erin Durant, litigator, founder of Durant Barristers, Russell, ON. “Hot takes from an Ontario law firm. Home of the tea for subscribers.”
   —> Recommended post: Where have all the mid-career lawyers gone?

3. GeoLegal Notes, by Sean West, Co-Founder Hence Technologies, Santa Monica, CA. “Bridging the gap between global affairs and legal practice; helping equip legal leaders to thrive against a backdrop of increasing global complexity.”
   —> Recommended post: Law and Politics of Supply Chains for Goods, AI and Knowledge

4. LawDroid Manifesto, by Tom Martin, CEO, LawDroid, Vancouver. Observations from a legaltech founder about AI, law practice, and the intersection of the two.
   Recommended post: Moravec's Irony: Why Lawyers Won't Be Happy Until AI Replaces Them

5. The 80/20 Principle, by Ernie The Attorney (Ernie Svenson), lawyer and consultant, New Orleans. “Insights for using technology and psychology to work smarter, reduce friction, and gain freedom.”
   Recommended post: How to Think More Clearly

In addition to these five, please also take a moment to click through and check out these ten other excellent newsletters:

• AIIF Legal, by Harold Godsoe, lawyer, Tokyo
  Recommended post: Everyone is Committing Copyright Infringement

• Clinton’s Substack, by Clinton Onyenemezu, Lagos State, Nigeria
  Recommended post: Empowering Non-Technical Founders & Reshaping Product Management: How GPT-4’s Multimodal Abilities are Redefining Product Delivery

• Cross (+) Gavel, by Anton Sorkin, Christian Legal Society, Washington, DC
  Recommended post: “And Who Is My Neighbor?”

• Culture of Law, by Charlotte Smith, Level7 Legal, Los Gatos, CA
  Recommended post: Building Culture to Hire For The Future

• Digital Legislation, by Computer-Readable Legislation, Jersey, CI
  Recommended post: Launching the Computer-Readable Legislation Project

• Lean Lawyering, by Gerard Groarke, trial lawyer, Dublin
  Recommended post: From 1,000+ pages to 72 relevant ones

• Sigh But Why, by Ian Chai, lawyer and technologist, Singapore
  Recommended post: What I learned about AI from squash

• Texas Appellate Counsel, D. Todd Smith, Austin, TX
  Recommended post: A Behind-the-Scenes Look at Texas's Fourth Court of Appeals

• The Business of Criminal Law, by Joshua Baron, criminal defense lawyer, Lehi UT
  Recommended post: Never Quote a Price Until You Tell a Story

• The Business of Law Across Emerging Nations, by The GRM Group, Cape Town
  Recommended post: Attrition Report

• Thought-provoking Things Worth Sharing, by Mike McBride, eDiscovery and Training expert, Baton Rouge, LA
  Recommended post: Issue #125

If you want to recommend a great legal newsletter (and it can absolutely be your own), please do so in the comments below. The legal periodical ecosystem is still evolving from the days (my days) of print newspapers and glossy magazines, and we don’t know what the future of legal journalism and legal insight exchange will look like. But I do know that we’re all going to create it together, one new publication at a time.