Weaver: Transition is bringing changes to the Indiana Lawyer

We’re in a period of transition at the Indiana Lawyer.

I’m filling in as the interim editor until our parent company, IBJ Media, names a permanent successor to Olivia Covington, who is getting married and has moved away to take another job.

Meanwhile, my colleagues at the Indianapolis Business Journal are covering my regular duties as managing editor at IBJ.

Transitions are usually a good time to reexamine what we do and how we do them. That’s why we’re in the early stages of embarking on some new approaches at Indiana Lawyer that align with the vision of our publisher and IBJ Media CEO Nate Feltman, who also happens to be an attorney.

The changes are meant to broaden our coverage of legal issues and be more reflective of the digital age.

Part of the plan is to expand our reporting on the business aspects of running a law firm and the role lawyers play in helping businesses themselves navigate the complex legal landscape.

We’ve already made one significant foray into this area with the launch of our monthly M&A e-newsletter to help you keep up with the latest merger and acquisition news in Indiana. A story from that newsletter appears in our print edition this week and provides insight into why the impact on workers by the proposed Kroger-Albertsons merger may play a larger role in this antitrust challenge than in previous cases brought by the Federal Trade Commission.

Look for more business-related coverage in the future, especially as it relates to attorney involvement in lobbying and government affairs.

We also plan to extend our coverage of county courts, new lawsuits and interesting trials across the state, adding to our already extensive coverage of state and federal appellate courts, the Indiana Supreme Court and the state attorney general’s office.

A good example of the kind of coverage we want to do more regularly is another story in our print edition about the $42 million judgment Tesla and an employee were ordered to pay an Avon motorcyclist for severe injuries he received in a crash with a Tesla-owned vehicle.

To create more time for our reporters to dig into these areas, we no longer will publish the extended summaries of appellate court decisions that used to appear online and in the back of our print edition. Instead, we will publish shorter blurbs on appellate decisions of the greatest interest to our loyal lawyer following. We also will write full news stories on the most newsworthy decisions.

We want to continue to provide large and small legal practices and solo practitioners with a guide to the appellate decisions, providing important updates on criminal law, product liability, family law and more. But our thinking is that if you are really interested in a case, you will want to look at the entire decision, rather than extended summaries from us.

To that end, we will continue to provide online links to the entire decisions on our web site and provide a daily roundup briefly summarizing appellate decisions released that day.

This also seems to be a good time to introduce you to our newest reporter, Maura Johnson, an Indiana University journalism grad who worked for nearly four years as a digital producer at WBND-Channel 57, the ABC affiliate in South Bend. She will be launching our more sustained coverage of trial court activities.

I invite you to share your thoughts about our coverage and the new changes by emailing me at [email protected]. And I encourage you to continue to share your story ideas and tips with our talented staff, including Managing Editor Daniel Carson and reporter Alexa Shrake.

Our goal is to share the most interesting legal stories about the state’s most interesting lawyers, their accomplishments and their milestones. So don’t let us miss a beat.•

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Greg Weaver is interim editor of Indiana Lawyer and managing editor of the Indianapolis Business Journal.