Editorial Advisory Board: The Daily Record – Who needs it?

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We, the Editorial Advisory Board of this paper, work for nothing. Well, more or less nothing, as journalistic exactitude demands disclosure that the paper’s publisher furnishes our meetings with occasional platters of low-budget sandwiches and potato chips. So, why do we do it?

We think, debate, write, argue, agree (and disagree) on a wide range of topics. The results appear periodically on the pages and website of this paper. But the things we don’t usually think about consciously are whether there is anybody out there who cares about what we have to say or who even reads us — or The Daily Record, for that matter. Occasionally, though, we should stop and think about what earthly purpose we and this paper serve.

From its founding in 1888 by Edwin Warfield, through many years of Warfield family proprietorship and down to our present publishers, The Daily Record has been Maryland’s legal paper of record. The countless legal notices this paper has printed, the thousands of opinions of the Maryland and federal courts it has published — either verbatim or as part of a major piece of legal news and even — putting modesty aside — the commentary it has carried, have been the major source informing the legal profession from the 19th down to the 21st century.

But does it still matter to the profession?

We think it all does. The Maryland legal community continues to read The Daily Record. How do we have personal knowledge of this (see Fed. R. Evid. 602)? Largely because when our pieces please or irritate, we get calls. And we get letters. And we get emails, and we read blog postings. We also read this paper ourselves, not just to see our names in (small) print. But mostly we see it being read by our colleagues in our offices, in preference even to the “real newspapers” that are read mostly by folks in our reception areas, awaiting torture by deposition.

The legal profession in Maryland needs a paper that tells it what it needs to know. What “real newspapers” report as legal news usually has nothing to do with the everyday professional lives of lawyers. But what The Daily Record has told them has, for 125 years now, kept the blades of their legal scalpels sharp.

Speaking of which, as is well known among our lawyer readers, this state is one of the few without mandatory continuing legal education, leaving this paper as a major de facto purveyor of legal education to the profession.

Our Maryland legal community values and needs this paper, as it has done since 1888. Much has changed since then, but the legal community’s need for a reliable and easily accessed paper focusing on what is of interest to its members has not. Although business and real estate news are of interest to a wider professional community and should form a part of this paper’s content, it will always be a Maryland lawyer’s journal. Every lawyer in this state needs it.