Co-founder of the Legal Times
Stephen A. Glasser, who trained as a lawyer but found far greater fulfillment shaping the legal profession as a publisher and entrepreneur, died Aug. 25 at a hospital in Manhattan. He was 79.
The cause was congestive heart failure, said his daughter Susan Glasser, a staff writer at the New Yorker and former editor at The Washington Post.
Mr. Glasser partnered with his wife in 1978 to found the Legal Times, a small but influential newspaper that helped demystify a traditionally secretive and insular industry.
When Mr. Glasser started the Legal Times in Washington with his wife, Lynn, knowledge of the legal profession was generally limited to “anybody who watched ‘Perry Mason,’” said William J. Perlstein, an FTI Consulting executive and former co-managing partner of the law firm WilmerHale. The Glassers “transformed the understanding of law in America,” he added, by founding a newspaper that “actually brought law firms and lawyers to life.”
Backed by the publishing firm Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, where Mr. Glasser had run a business and law division, the weekly tabloid reported on all kinds of legal issues, from Treasury Department regulations to energy, securities and environmental law. The newspaper had a Washington focus that was reflected in its original name, Legal Times of Washington, although its publishers technically lived in Montclair, N.J., commuting to the publication’s Dupont Circle offices each week via the Eastern Airlines shuttle.
For top editor, the Glassers hired David Beckwith, a Time magazine reporter who had scooped the U.S. Supreme Court on its own Roe v. Wade decision. Later hires included reporter Kim Masters, now an editor-atlarge at the Hollywood Reporter.
“Before the Legal Times, there had never been a general interest, independent commercial publication that promised an objective outside look at lawyers, particularly the big firms operating in major cities,” Mr. Beckwith wrote in an email. He added that Mr. Glasser and his wife saw an opening after a 1977 Supreme Court decision that upheld the rights of lawyers to advertise their services, and after the American Bar Association loosened its own advertising rules as well.
The timing seemed especially right under the Carter administration, which passed “a torrent of new federal regulations business,” he said, “making Washington corporate lawyers even more important than ever.”
Mr. Glasser had aspired to a journalism career in college, spending summers working at newspapers in Gloucester, Mass., and Detroit before his family insisted he go to law school. As publisher, he remained a steady, indefatigable presence in the office even as his newspaper “thoroughly frightened, amused and created howls of outrage among the corporate law community,” Mr. Beckwith said.
The Legal Times was especially known for a gossip column called Inadmissible, which was originated by Mr. Glasser and chronicled courtroom errors, law firm blowups and industry foibles, much to the irritation of subjects like the Washington firm Wilkes Artis. “A lot of people around our place would like to string them up,” one of the firm’s lawyers told The Post in 1979, after the Legal Times reported on an internal split at the firm.
Mr. Glasser was still working in recent years, organizing conferences and continuingeducation programs through his latest venture, Sandpiper Partners. He also helped found a hospice in Glen Ridge, N.J., and worked in higher education, serving on the advisory board of Montclair State University’s communications school.