Stephen Glasser, co-founder of the Legal Times newspaper, dies at 79

The trigger was congestive coronary heart failure, mentioned his daughter Susan Glasser, a employees author on the New Yorker and former editor at The Washington Publish.

When Mr. Glasser began the Authorized Occasions in Washington together with his spouse, Lynn, information of the authorized occupation was usually restricted to “anyone who watched ‘Perry Mason,’ ” mentioned William J. Perlstein, an FTI Consulting government and former co-managing accomplice of the regulation agency WilmerHale. Stephen and Lynn Glasser “reworked the understanding of regulation in America,” he added, by founding a newspaper that “truly introduced regulation companies and legal professionals to life.”

Backed by the publishing agency Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, the place Mr. Glasser had run a enterprise and regulation division, the weekly tabloid reported on every kind of authorized points, from Treasury Division laws to vitality, securities and environmental regulation. The newspaper had a Washington focus that was mirrored in its unique title, Authorized Occasions of Washington, though its publishers technically lived in Montclair, N.J., commuting to the publication’s Dupont Circle places of work every week by way of the Japanese Airways shuttle.

For prime editor, the Glassers employed David Beckwith, a Time journal reporter who had scooped the U.S. Supreme Court docket by itself Roe v. Wade resolution. Later hires included reporter Kim Masters, now an editor-at-large on the Hollywood Reporter.

“Earlier than the Authorized Occasions, there had by no means been a basic curiosity, unbiased industrial publication that promised an goal outdoors take a look at legal professionals, significantly the massive companies working in main cities,” Beckwith wrote in an e-mail. He added that Mr. Glasser and his spouse noticed a gap after a 1977 Supreme Court docket resolution that upheld the rights of legal professionals to promote their companies, and after the American Bar Affiliation loosened its personal promoting guidelines as properly.

The timing appeared particularly proper beneath the Carter administration, which handed “a torrent of latest federal laws on enterprise,” he mentioned, “making Washington company legal professionals much more necessary than ever.”

Mr. Glasser had aspired to a journalism profession in school, spending summers working at newspapers in Gloucester, Mass., and Detroit earlier than his household insisted he go to regulation college. As writer, he remained a gentle, indefatigable presence within the workplace at the same time as his newspaper “totally frightened, amused and created howls of concern among the many company regulation neighborhood,” Beckwith mentioned.

The Authorized Occasions was particularly identified for a gossip column known as Inadmissible, which was originated by Mr. Glasser and chronicled courtroom errors, regulation agency blowups and trade foibles, a lot to the irritation of topics just like the Washington agency Wilkes Artis. “Lots of people round our place want to string them up,” one of many agency’s legal professionals informed The Post in 1979, after the Authorized Occasions reported on an inside cut up on the agency.

The newspaper vied for readers and advertisers with two different nationwide authorized publications that debuted in its wake: the month-to-month American Lawyer, which was based by editor Steven Brill, and the weekly Nationwide Regulation Journal, a sibling of the a lot older New York Regulation Journal. All three got here beneath the management of Brill, who purchased the Authorized Occasions in 1986 for a reported $2 million to $4 million. By then, the paper had a circulation of about 6,000 and was dwarfed by its rivals, The Post reported at the time.

The newspaper merged with the Nationwide Regulation Journal in 2009. By then, authorized information sources had proliferated, with web sites and blogs together with Above the Regulation, the Volokh Conspiracy and SCOTUSblog providing info that was as soon as out there solely via newspapers just like the Authorized Occasions.

“It’s only a magnitude of 100 of what was out there earlier than we acquired began,” Beckwith mentioned in a cellphone interview. “I believe we have been form of the door openers.” He recalled that when the newspaper acquired began, he and its employees had bother getting fundamental info from regulation companies, together with particulars on the variety of legal professionals they employed or who led their litigation division. However “inside only a few months, they have been giving out what would have induced them an aneurysm to share.”

The oldest of three youngsters, Stephen Andrew Glasser was born in Memphis on July 27, 1943. His mom, the previous Esther Kron, was a social employee. His father, Melvin A. Glasser, supervised medical discipline trials for Jonas Salk’s polio vaccine and was later an official of the United Auto Employees union and the Well being Safety Motion Council in Washington.

His father’s profession took the household to Arlington, Va., after which Rye, N.Y., the place Mr. Glasser graduated from highschool. He studied political science at Colgate College in Hamilton, N.Y., and acquired a bachelor’s diploma in 1965, the identical yr he married Lynn Schreiber. She supported him via regulation college, working a day job whereas he attended the College of Michigan.

After he graduated in 1968, he practiced regulation for just a few months, working as a lawyer on the Labor Division in Washington, earlier than going into enterprise together with his spouse and transferring to Montclair. Collectively, they labored on the New York Regulation Journal, the place Mr. Glasser turned government vp and government editor, and later at Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, publishing authorized newsletters and books by James C. Freund, a number one mergers-and-acquisitions lawyer, and Bruce W. Sanford, a First Modification specialist.

In 1995, they began a brand new enterprise, Glasser LegalWorks, which organized regulation conferences and administration boards. The corporate was offered to FindLaw, a subsidiary of the Thomson media conglomerate, in 2003.

Mr. Glasser was nonetheless working in recent times, organizing conferences and continuing-education applications via his newest enterprise, Sandpiper Companions. He additionally helped discovered a hospice in Glen Ridge, N.J., and labored in larger schooling, serving on the advisory board of Montclair State College’s communications college and as a trustee and former board chairman of Bloomfield School, a predominantly Black establishment in New Jersey.

Along with his daughter Susan, of Washington, survivors embrace his spouse, Lynn, of Montclair, and three different youngsters: Laura Glasser, a former TV author who labored on “The West Wing,” of South Pasadena, Calif.; Jeffrey Glasser, a vp and basic counsel on the Los Angeles Occasions; and Jennifer Glasser, a accomplice on the regulation agency White & Case, of Scarsdale, N.Y. Survivors additionally embrace two sisters and 7 grandchildren.

“It says one thing about my dad’s affect on all of us that of his 4 youngsters, two are writers and two are legal professionals,” mentioned Susan Glasser, who devoted her forthcoming ebook “The Divider: Trump within the White Home, 2017-2021” partly to her father. (The ebook was written together with her husband, New York Occasions reporter Peter Baker, and can also be devoted to his father, Ted.)

In a cellphone interview, she described Mr. Glasser as a voracious reader who “understood the worth of unique, dependable info,” saying he was targeted on “information and scoops” each as a writer and as a subscriber to 3 each day newspapers. “If you’d like folks to pay for info, it has to have worth to them,” she mentioned. “That has turned out to be a really helpful perception for transformations in journalism that he couldn’t presumably have imagined when he began his profession.”