Colorado Bar Association, Legal Blogs in Colorado Series: The Race to the Bottom

As a result of our coverage of the 42^nd Annual Rocky Mountain Securities Conference, the CBA profiled The Race to the Bottom in their series on legal blogs in Colorado.  We appreciate the CBA taking the time to acknowledge our work and for continuing to include us in their events. 

Here is the article:

Local Links: From DU, the Only Student-Faculty Collaborative Legal Blog in the Country

This is part two of our new series featuring blogs by members of the Colorado legal community.

The Race to the Bottom is a faculty-student blog published by University of Denver Law School. As you might recall, several of its bloggers recently attended and covered our annual securities conference. The blog’s faculty sponsor (and frequent contributor), Professor Jay Brown, and its managing editor, student Charles Nichols, recently took some time to talk with us about their blog.

1. Tell us a little about The Race to the Bottom, how it got started, and its purpose.

Two University of Denver Law students and Professor Jay Brown started The Race to the Bottom as a parallel to a law journal on corporate governance in 2007. The blog focuses on corporate governance in the post Sarbanes-Oxley era. The two students, with a number of classmates and a great deal of effort, designed the website, fleshed out the vision for the blog and got the project off the ground.

The Race to the Bottom is now the only student-faculty collaborative legal blog in the nation. Further, the blog is closely followed by both the local and national legal community and has been cited in briefs, law review articles and court opinions. This article (.pdf) will provide a more in-depth look at this question.

2. Who writes for the blog and how are those people selected?

The blog is made up of both student and faculty contributors. Our student contributors are selected through a selective write-on candidacy held every semester at the University of Denver Sturm College of Law. All candidates complete a case analysis and a citation exercise and the Executive Board reviews every packet and anonymously selects the future contributors.

The Race to the Bottom also has faculty contribution from Professor Jay Brown, other DU faculty as well as other faculty throughout the country who are invited to contribute based on their focus on corporate governance issues.

3. You guys manage to really crank out some quality content. How do you coordinate who’s covering what?

We try to make sure contributors are writing on subjects they are interested in as that lends itself to a stronger product. Our student contributors report to one of two senior editors who in turn report to our managing editor and editor in chief. This process allows the editors to get a good understanding of the contributor’s interests, writing level and underlying knowledge and therefore assign posts that align with those interests. As the blog matures, we are beginning to focus certain students writing in specific areas to develop “specialists” and allow our coverage to go into more depth than it otherwise would.

4. What case that you have followed has had the “most read” posts?

At any given time, we focus on two or three major cases. When we do this, we follow every filing, hearing, motion etc. that takes place in that case. Our first, and most widely followed case was (and continues to be) the insider trading case of former Qwest CEO Joseph Nacchio. This case acted as a great springboard for the blog. The close proximity of the hearings allowed us to have contributors attend every day of the trial and provide an in-depth coverage of the legal aspects of the proceedings. This coverage distinguished us since much of the other coverage of the trial was more typical news reporting and we were the main source covering the legal nuance of the case. The Race to the Bottom’s coverage of Mr. Nacchio’s trial helped increase our readership and create a niche in the legal community rather quickly.

Our Nacchio posts can be found here.

5. What has been the blog’s greatest success so far?

From a “most read” perspective, our coverage of the Nacchio case is our greatest success to date. We continue to write on the resentencing aspects of the case and our following of those posts continues to be strong.

That said, on a broader level, being able to grow the blog and improve the quality of our product over the past three years has been a great success. We are proud to have turned what was an idea by a group of students a few years ago into a legal forum that is generating more and more respect on campus and in the legal community. We have a very strong group of student and faculty contributors, both current and past, who have worked very hard to make The Race to the Bottom a success and we are pleased to be making strides towards that goal.



Comments

[Alli Gerkman]

Thanks for being willing participants! We love these posts about legal bloggers here in Colorado.