Another Partnership is Born

We’ve (very) recently written about the selection of the new staff our twentieth year of LII Bulletin.  But this year’s staff saw the Bulletin’s audience recently expand in a new and exciting way.

In December, LII’s Associate Director for Content Development, Craig Newton, was approached by the incoming president of the San Diego Chapter of the Federal Bar Association.  San Diego attorney Joe Leventhal was already familiar with the LII website and also the Bulletin, principally through the re-publication of select Bulletin content in The Federal Lawyer, the magazine of the national Federal Bar Association.

As an active Federal Bar Association member, Mr. Leventhal was wondering how he could put similar high-quality content into his local chapter’s quarterly newsletter.  San Diego is a busy marketplace for attorneys concentrating in diverse areas of Federal law ranging from single-lawyer immigration practices to lawyers working for large and sophisticated international law firms engaged in high-stakes patent infringement lawsuits.

Craig suggested that the San Diego chapter could re-publish some of the Bulletin content not published in the national magazine–namely the cases originating from the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.  Because the Southern District of California is part of the Ninth Circuit (along with Arizona, Nevada, Idaho, Montana, Washington, Oregon, Alaska, Hawaii, and US territories in the Pacific), cases from the Ninth Circuit are of particular interest to lawyers in San Diego.

The San Diego Chapter’s Winter Newsletter contained the LII Bulletin article on Petrella v. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Inc.–a copyright case originating from the Ninth Circuit and argued before the Supreme Court in late January.  Feedback from the newsletter staff and its readership was all positive.  We are repeating the experiment in their Spring Newsletter.

But it gets better.

We are now working with the board that advises all the local Federal Bar Association chapters within the Ninth Circuit to have this same content also included in all their newsletters.  If all goes well, lawyers from the Mariana Islands to Montana (as well as major law centers like Los Angeles, San Francisco, Phoenix, and Seattle) will be reading our students’ work for the 2014 – 2015 Supreme Court term come October.  We are excited for this chance to serve the profession while growing our own audience and increasing the professional exposure of our student-authors.

And why stop there?

If all goes well in the Ninth Circuit, we’ll be looking to expand our relationships into the other Circuits.  We can easily picture a day in the not-too-distant future where local Federal Bar Association chapters throughout the country are using our previews to inform their membership about the nature and status of cases that originated in their Circuit and made their way to the United States Supreme Court.  If you are a lawyer active in your local chapter of the Federal Bar Association, we’d love to hear from you to help us make this happen.

Meanwhile, if you aren’t already familiar with the Bulletin, please have a look here, and we invite you to sign up here to receive this free service via email.