Steven Brill's Court TV isn't just reporting courtroom drama, it's becoming the law's interface to the public. And it's great TV.
TV sucks, but you can't blame the box. As a piece of hardware, it's sophisticated, efficient, easy to use. It rarely crashes. It's cheap. When you switch it on, it doesn't make Bill Gates any richer (not yet, anyway). It's capable of receiving a beautiful clear picture from anywhere in the world. Install a camera in Red Square, point a dish at the stars, and in an instant, 100 million people can have Russian tanks rolling into their living rooms. TV takes you places with the most powerful vehicle technology has yet built: pure image, pure picture.
Of course, it rarely works that way. Since television started proliferating across the earth in the '50s, programmers have thrown more and more stuff between you and the picture. We now have razzle-dazzle graphics and witty commentary and million-dollar anchors and intrepid correspondents and ads for Saabs and hemorrhoid ointments and breakfast cereals and an endless parade of bozos blathering on and on.
There have been moments of great clarity and power: The McCarthy hearings. The moon landing. The Persian Gulf war. O.J. in the white Bronco. But in general, TV has moved away from the simple notion of pointing a camera at the world and showing it to you. Along the way, we have forgotten what a great journalistic tool TV is, with its tremendous power and immediacy.
Now there's Court TV to remind us. The cable network harks back to the roots of television - back to the days before the graphics and the clutter, before the soft lighting and blow-dried hair. It's primitive television, and it's powerful. Court TV is just a camera in a courtroom, you in your living room, and nothing in between. Like life, it's both dull and dramatic, prosaic and profound. As the Court TV ads say: "Great drama. No scripts." Who needs Law and Order when you've got Erik Menendez crying on the witness stand?
Ted Turner could have started Court TV. Barry Diller could have. Even Roone Arledge could have. But they didn't. It took Steve Brill, a slightly mad tub-thumper and muckraker, to figure out that all you have to do is install a camera in a courtroom and turn it on, and there you have it, the greatest software factory in the world.
Brill's empire, officially known as American Lawyer Media, occupies four floors of a Manhattan glass tower on the corner of Third Avenue and 40th Street. The Court TV studio and newsroom are housed here, as are most of American Lawyer Media's other operations, including The American Lawyer - a splashy magazine Brill started in the late '70s that remains his flagship publication - as well as Lexis Counsel Connect, a new online service for lawyers. American Lawyer Media also controls 10 regional legal publications around the country. All told, the company employs about 700 people.
Brill's office is on the second floor, overlooking Third Avenue. It's large and light and cluttered: a National Magazine Award on the window sill, drawings by his three kids taped on the walls, a television in the bookcase that's always tuned to Court TV. When I meet him for the first time, he's working on two computers at once, replying to e-mail on his portable, doing who-knows-what on his desktop.
Brill leans over from behind his desk and gives my hand a manly shake. He's tall, balding, moves with a swagger. His clothes also suggest power: handmade blue-and-white pinstripe shirt, French cuffs, brown suede suspenders. A fat unlit Macanudo cigar in his mouth, mogul-style. A can of Tab on the desk.
What's the first thing he says? "Wired magazine, huh? Great magazine. Too bad it's impossible to read. Whoever designed that thing ought to be taken out and shot."
Typical Brill chutzpah. He is a rabble-rouser, a journalist-mogul whose greatest talent is breaking down walls.
Take The American Lawyer, for example. During the '80s, the magazine sent shock waves through the legal profession by publishing the salaries of big-name lawyers and the profitability of high-profile law firms. The magazine takes a tabloidlike glee in tweaking sacred cows: last year, for its 15-year anniversary issue, the editors doctored a photo of a potential chairman of one of the biggest New York law firms to make him look 15 years older and ran it on the cover to illustrate a story about the future of the law biz. In his regular column in the magazine, Brill (who considers himself first and foremost a writer) constantly pummels lawyers for being uncreative, closed-minded, and technophobic.
Court TV is another example of Brill's barrier busting. The 24-hour court channel, jointly owned by Time Warner Inc., Liberty Media Corporation, and others, broadcasts one or two trials each weekday - usually live. The terrain ranges from Judge Ito's courtroom in Los Angeles to the World Court in The Hague, from murder to civil rights. Evenings are reserved for more conventional programming like Prime Time Justice, a review and analysis of the day's court proceedings, and The System, which uses hand-held cameras to follow particular cases through each exhaustive step of the judicial system.
Until Court TV came along, courtrooms didn't exist for most law-abiding (or law-evading) citizens. Courthouses were distant, crowded places one hoped never to visit. On TV, journalists controlled the flow of information, telling us what to think and what to see, giving us crayon sketches of the most dramatic moments. But Court TV destroys the wall between society and its laws, making reporters and jurors of us all. Thanks to O.J., even my grandmother knows what voir dire is.
That done, Brill is now pointing his wrecking ball at the walls within law firms. If Brill has his way, American Lawyer Media's new online offerings will rewire the way the legal profession conducts its business. Two years ago, American Lawyer Media jumped into the electronic fray with Counsel Connect; later, this became Lexis Counsel Connect when a partnership was formed with the legal sister of database giant Nexis. With the online service, and with characteristic bravado, Brill aims to do nothing less than grab the 800,000 or so lawyers in America by the collar and drag them, kicking and screaming, into the 21st century. It won't be easy.
Court TV's daily editorial meeting can be a dangerous event. For one thing, there's Brill's mercurial personality. He has a reputation for being a graduate of the Steve Jobs School of Management: he drives employees to meet his high and often impossibly exacting standards - if they screw up, he screams. Even Brill's friends say that working with him is "both exhilarating and terrifying." His hyper-competitive streak was forever enshrined in a 1986 Wall Street Journal profile, which opened with a description of the water-polo games at company parties held at Brill's Westchester home. According to a staffer quoted in the article, Brill got so carried away that he bit one of his employees in the course of the game.
But it's not just Brill's personality that makes these meetings tricky. It's the furniture. To get to the meeting area in Court TV's newsroom, you must navigate through hallways and a disorienting maze of cubicles jammed with cardboard boxes and debris; a journey made treacherous by ripped carpet. When you finally reach the meeting area - a rectangular wooden table that looks like it was picked up secondhand from the Office Depot - you can't just sit anywhere. On the day I attend the meeting, I'm warned against one chair because it is broken. Choosing another, I sit down and hear a loud rriiiiipppp. My pants. The cover was missing from one of the armrests, leaving a long and very sharp screw exposed.
The meeting is scheduled to begin at 4 p.m. Unlike most meetings at Court TV, which run on Brill time, this one begins at the appointed hour. It's attended by Court TV's top editorial staff, including Fred Graham, Court TV anchor and the host of Washington Watch, the network's weekly talk show devoted to Washington-based legal news, and Steve Johnson, the executive producer responsible for Court TV's day-to-day running. Also at the meeting are a half-dozen lower-level editors, producers, and researchers.
Brill arrives with his omnipresent props: a Macanudo and a can of Tab. His blue suspenders have little red animals on them. (Dinosaurs? Horses?) He quickly gets down to business. "So what've we got today?"
"We're waiting for the verdict on Lucas," says Mike Archer, Court TV's executive editor. In Texas v. Lukas, the adult son of a millionaire and former mayor is accused of knocking his mother off the stairs and killing her. The jury is now deliberating, a verdict expected at any moment. "Off the record," Archer says, "we've heard that the jury is eleven to one for conviction."
Low whistles, murmurs. Brill nods and glances up at the planning board on the wall. Most of the trials
Court TV is covering - or planning to cover - are listed, along with a brief description of the case: start date, estimated end date, reporter assigned, et cetera. Besides the O.J. Simpson trial, there's Zion v. New York Hospital ("wrongful death of 18-year-old Libby Zion due to injection of Demerol"); Missouri v. Neeley ("woman shot friend for raping daughter"); and Fentress v. Eli Lilly ("victims & family members sue Eli Lilly after man on Prozac kills eight co-workers").
"What's going on with Zion?" Brill asks.
"Expert medical witness is on the stand," says Johnson. "He's saying everything the hospital did was wrong."
"What about O.J.?"
"We've got the hearing about Judge Ito's wife," Archer says.
"What's that going to take, like five minutes?"
"At most."
Brill sighs.
"We need a good West Coast trial," Johnson says.
"What have we got?"
"Not much."
"I like Zion," Brill says. "It's a great trial for us."
"Tom Moore is amazing," Johnson answers, referring to the flamboyant malpractice attorney representing the plaintiff, Sidney Zion. Moore, a former priest, has been attracting considerable attention in the New York media, raising debate over the effect his courtroom theatrics are having on the jury.
"He gives great television," one of the trial trackers mumbles.
Brill yawns. A few minutes later, the meeting is adjourned. Perhaps, as some of Brill's friends say, he's mellowing with age.
Or perhaps he's just conserving energy for the coming O.J.-a-thon. Although the start date of the murder trial is still more than a month away, signs of battle preparation are everywhere: the phone number of defense attorney Robert Shapiro is taped to the wall of the newsroom. Court TV reporters wonder aloud what their life will be like in "the post-O.J. era."
And Brill is doing everything he can to make sure the world knows that when O.J. hits, Court TV is the place to be: "Our 273rd Trial" the copy reads in a full-page ad in The New York Times. Below, a huge grainy photo of an anguished-looking O.J. "For world news, there's CNN.
For Sports, there's ESPN. MTV is music television and
C-SPAN is our eye on Congress.... And since 1991, legal journalism has had its own brand name: Court TV."
Ask Brill about it, and he tends to shrug it off, saying that big trials like O.J.'s aren't Court TV's main fare; that its reputation is built on the solid, day-to-day programming of interesting trials. But that's not exactly true. Rodney King and Jeffrey Dahmer and Baby Jessica and William Kennedy Smith put Court TV on the map. But Erik and Lyle drew the crowds. Brill doesn't like to admit it because it brings up a whole range of uncomfortable questions, but O.J. is his main man, his TV star.
Lots of people don't like Brill because he doesn't kiss the right rings. They don't get his mix of high and low, of blood and brains. While Brill often talks about the educational value of Court TV, there is always somebody whispering offstage that what he's really doing is packaging the often gruesome and titillating drama that goes on in American courts.
Brill scoffs at the notion, and it's easy to understand why: the whole idea of cameras in the courts is still a delicate legal issue, and the last thing Brill wants is to be seen exploiting the situation. In fact, Brill has been hugging the high road lately, going so far as to call for "A New Code For Journalists" in a recent column. ("Here's a new lawyer joke: Question: Why should lawyers love the press? Answer: Journalism is the only profession that makes lawyers look good.")
"You wouldn't believe the fucking things my people ask me to cover," Brill says to me on the phone one afternoon. To prove it, he faxes me a tracking report of a trial in Denver that some poor soul at Court TV had argued the network should cover.
The case, Roth v. Robinson and Jefferson Center for Mental Health, is described in the report as "a strange love triangle between a therapist, her husband, and her patient." Lynda Robinson, a young psychotherapist, began treating Lisa Roth for various emotional problems in the mid-'80s. The two became very close, and Lisa moved into Lynda's house. Lisa allegedly developed multiple personalities, which Lynda strove to "reintegrate." When Lisa's "regressed" personality was dominant, she slept curled up between Lynda and her husband in bed. A sexual relationship developed, and in 1992, Robinson's husband, Richard, who had by then left Lynda, married Lisa.
In the trial, Lisa is suing Lynda for malpractice. Lynda's defense: she lost her memory of the events in question due to a toxic reaction to her leaking breast implants.
"Can you believe it?" Brill says. "There are hundreds of cases like this out there. We could air this kind of junk 24 hours a day if we wanted to."
Brill bashers might argue that this sounds a touch disingenuous from the man who turned Erik and Lyle into cultural icons. But on the other hand, imagine Court TV in the hands of someone like Rupert Murdoch.
"Steve is responsible almost to a fault," says Merrill Brown, who helped Brill get Court TV off the ground, and who is now the editor of Time Daily (Time magazine's online daily news service). Brown says he has often pushed Brill - without much success - to cover higher profile trials. "There have been a lot of great murder cases that don't get on TV because Steve doesn't want it to be known as The Murder Channel."
Brill says the trial that gave him the most angst was that of infamous penis slasher, Lorena Bobbitt. "I just thought the whole thing was a Jay Leno joke." Many Court TV staffers - particularly women, Brill says - lobbied hard for it. But Court TV is a monarchy, not a democracy, and Brill ruled. Yet when the trial he had intended to cover fell apart, he went with Bobbitt at the last minute. Now he's glad he did. "Watching Lorena's testimony on the stand was a transforming experience for me," Brill says. "It drove home the issue of spousal abuse like nothing I've ever seen before."
Brill grew up skinny and bookish, the son of a Queens liquor-store owner. After graduating from Yale Law School, he skipped the bar exam and started writing about the law for New York and Esquire.
In 1979, he founded The American Lawyer, then began expanding his empire in 1985 with a string of smaller regional legal publications.
In the late '80s, he was wrestling with the idea of starting a law magazine for consumers when he happened to hear a four-second snatch of a trial on the radio in a New York cab. "That's when it hit me," Brill says now. "If people want to learn about the law, why not just show it to them?"
So he did a song and dance for Steve Ross, then chairman of Warner Communications Inc. (just prior to the Time-Warner merger), and won his backing. In July 1991, Court TV went on the air with 4 million subscribers. Today, they number 16 million.
Brill transplanted the ethos of a hard-core print journalist to the screen. The American Lawyer, for all its tabloid spin, has a reputation for merciless fact-checking and accuracy. The same rigor applies to Court TV. Brill says he goes over any written material himself before it goes on the air. ("And it's not just because I'm a maniac, which I am.") If a production assistant makes a mistake, his or her name is often noted in the on-air correction. Cynthia McFadden, a Court TV alumna and now law correspondent for ABC News, says "Steve demands accountability to the point of public humiliation."
Brill's obsessiveness pays off on the screen. Court TV's graphics are superb, always identifying the person on screen and the context ("Murder trial. Cross of Defendant's Elder Daughter by State"). Analysis is smart, comprehensive, and plain-spoken.
But the real power of Court TV is more than just good journalism, more than just interpretation or analysis. You get hooked on Court TV because of the purity of the medium. The bad lighting, the bad sound. The slow pan and focus of the single camera; no obnoxious cutting, no two-shots. You have to concentrate, you have to look. And the closer you look, the more nuance is revealed. The nervous tick of a defense witness. The finger-tapping judge. Nothing escapes notice. In the courtroom, the camera becomes the unblinking eye of God.
Back in the late '80s or early '90s, Brill discovered computer networks. He doesn't remember when or where it happened. It's not the kind of thing that would stick in his brain. He's not a technophile himself - in fact, even today he takes pride in maintaining a kind of idiot-savant attitude toward hardware. But Brill was shrewd enough to grasp the possibilities inherent in this new technology, and he began thinking of ways to put it to use.
He didn't have to think very hard. As a business, law may be the least efficient, backward, anachronistic vocation in America. Besides the width of the ties, not much has changed since the '20s and '30s, when law firms first expanded to handle the needs of corporate America. Now here, in computer networks, was a tool that, if properly used, could make lawyers more efficient, more responsive, more productive. And, as Brill quickly understood, it might make him a potful of money.
In 1993, Counsel Connect was born (Lexis was added to the name and the service a year later). The idea behind it was simple. It begins with the understanding that law is a labor-intensive business: lawyers research specific problems for clients and charge by the hour. But what if - instead of starting from the ground up with every problem - you could instantly broadcast a rough idea of your problem to thousands of law firms across the country? And what if lawyers who had cracked a similar problem could get right back to you with an answer? A brief that might have taken 100 hours to research from the ground up might now take only 10. By changing the way lawyers communicate with each other and disseminate information, Lexis Counsel Connect could become the platform that finally moves the legal profession into the modern world.
Or so Brill thought. Counsel Connect was initially marketed to the core readers of The American Lawyer - attorneys from big white-shoe law firms and the legal departments of big corporations. It was basically a lawyers-only BBS, where they could post queries, communicate with each other, and browse a legal library of memos and briefs.
For this, subscribers were expected to pay US$975 a month, plus 65 cents per minute connect time.
It wasn't exactly an instant hit. First, Brill may have underestimated the degree of technophobia in the law profession. "A lot of lawyers think computers are harbingers of doom," says Logan Chandler, the director of sales and marketing at Lexis Counsel Connect. Second, the online service threatened to undermine the billing structure law firms have relied on for decades. "The basic problem is this," Chandler adds. "Law firms, which bill by the hour, are more profitable when less efficient." It's no surprise that the idea of paying a thousand dollars a month for a tool that cuts into the bottom line wasn't terribly attractive.
So changes were made. The price was slashed - the current rate is $15 a month, plus connect charges of $15 per hour after the first half-hour and a cap of five hours per month. David Johnson, a lawyer at Wilmer, Cutler, & Pickering, and an Electronic Frontier Foundation board member, got involved and pushed Brill and others to think of the service as a center for dialog and debate.
Mark Obbie, the president of Lexis Counsel Connect, says there are now 16,000 lawyers online, of which about 25 percent are active. (Judging from what I've seen, that's a generous estimate.) It's become a more diverse crowd since its inception, with lawyers from large firms and small, corporate and independent, east and west. The service has acquired an Internet gateway, and Lexis is available online. The American Lawyer, as well as the company's regional publications, are now available online, and an impressive library of legal documents is accumulating. The service is also offering private seminars (some for an additional fee) on subjects like "The Law of the Electronic Road."
In contrast to the legal forums on CompuServe and America Online and elsewhere on the Net, Lexis Counsel Connect sees itself as a tony, exclusive hangout. "You can think of Lexis Counsel Connect," says one ad, "as a polo lounge for lawyers."
"This isn't Newsweek trying to put Newsweek on a CD, or the Times putting restaurant reviews online," Brill says. "This is a different editorial product, one that strengthens the editorial products we already have." The service employs five full-time law editors to manage conferences and update legal info. Top lawyers and legal academics in various fields are paid to come online and provoke discussions. Brill himself is a major presence on Lexis Counsel Connect, running a popular conference called "Brill's Law Biz."
Content better be good, because the mechanics ain't. The Mac version I demoed on my Power PC was so slow I would have had to pitch a tent if I wanted to scroll all the way through a long discussion topic (to be fair, the DOS and Windows versions are faster, and a new Mac version is in the works). When I had a problem downloading a file, customer service reps were too busy to be helpful. Lexis Counsel Connect's much-touted personalized daily news service ("Personal Daily Alert") fed me a lot of nonsense.
As Lexis Counsel Connect sorts itself out, it's becoming clear that Brill's initial notion of how technology would change the business of law may have been ahead of its time, but it wasn't wrong. An experiment just getting underway on Lexis Counsel Connect proves this. The project, set up to manage a nationwide antitrust litigation, links the more than 100 law firms involved in the complex, high-profile case. These firms have access to a private area on the service and can use the network to archive materials (depositions, briefs) as well as discuss ongoing developments. "In a case like this, the administration of the suit is as challenging as the underlying law," says Logan Chandler, who is coordinating the operation. "How do you manage all these lawyers? How do you get them all in one place at one time to have a discussion? The answer is, you don't have to anymore."
Lexis Counsel Connect may or may not turn out to be the revolutionary tool Brill imagined. Still, the idea of a law firm as a permanent, physical place is being challenged. Who needs an army of secretaries and mahogany bookshelves anymore? Information technology is creating a new class of legal entrepreneurs who work together for individual projects, then disband and move on. Lawyers who resist this change, who steadfastly cling to old-world perks and protocols, may soon find themselves obsolete.
One more piece of Brill's empire bears mentioning: the Court TV Law Center, accessible on America Online and Prodigy. Right now, this area is filled mostly with Court TV cultists commenting on the theatrics of their favorite lawyers or wallowing in O.J. trivia. Some mildly interesting stuff does find its way here, like the discussion about the Simpson trial among a group of Harvard law students. Terry Moran, one of Court TV's most popular anchors, often logs on and answers questions. But for anyone who's less than a hard-core Court TV junkie, it's a snooze.
That may change. Several months ago, the Law Center added a topic called "Looking for Legal Help?" Response has been overwhelming. Hundreds of postings have shown up - people who have landlord problems, who need help with a divorce settlement or sexual harassment at work, or who need help settling a speeding ticket. People crying out for legal advice.
It's no wonder. One of the dirty, unspoken truths about the legal profession is that it's out of reach for many Americans. The poor may be able to get help through various legal-aid societies, and the rich, of course, can buy whatever advice they need. But the rest of us? We've been cut out.
Court TV's Law Center is one small example of how this is starting to change. Among other things, the center offers consumer advice to people shopping for a lawyer: e-mail an attorney's name to the Law Center, and a Court TV staffer will make sure he or she is legitimate. The center is also uploading excerpts of Court TV's Cradle-to-Grave Legal Survival Guide, a soon-to-be-published legal almanac that covers everything from living wills to small claims court. And, in what is surely a sign of things to come, lawyers are beginning to post advertisements for their services in Court TV's Law Center. Instead of ambulance chasers, we now have e-mail chasers.
Simple as it is, the Law Center is eroding the social and economic barriers that lawyers have erected for their own benefit - barriers that separate them from all of us. Technology isn't only making the business of law more efficient, it's making it more democratic.
Last October, at American Lawyer Media's biannual editorial retreat in Florida, Brill passed out a hand-drawn map of his empire. At first glance, it looks like the doodling of a 7-year-old. It turns out Brill drew it himself, as a way of conceptualizing the far-flung assets of the company, of charting its future. At the top are a series of boxes labeled "mags & newspapers," "Court TV," "Court TV's Law Center," and "Counsel Connect." At the bottom, in a row marked "Users," are boxes that represent "Lawyers," "Businesses," "Schools," and "Consumers." In between are dozens of lines connecting all the boxes together, looping around in a seemingly desperate attempt to tie the company together.
It's not easy. Brill's empire is still a scattershot operation - part traditional print publisher, part TV network, part new media adventure. There's synergy in there somewhere, but the only place where it all fits together is in Brill's head. One rival publisher compares his empire-building impulses to those of Robert Moses, the controversial urban planner who developed (some might say wrecked) New York City. "He sees a hole out there, and he just wants to fill it," says the publisher. "There's no business plan, no long-term strategic thinking."
There may be some truth to that. Brill is still flying by the seat of his pants, moving on instinct. How long he'll be able to keep it up remains a question. Neither Court TV nor Lexis Counsel Connect are profitable yet; on the other hand, as long as Brill's buddy Gerald Levin is in charge at Time Warner, the financial ballast is probably stable. Problems with cable carriers are starting to ease, and new delivery options like DirectTV are making Court TV more widely available. Cameras in the courtroom - once an iffy proposition - are gaining widespread acceptance.
But those are all details. What's more important is that over the years, Brill has pushed to transform the law from a kind of secular priesthood - with its own language, arcana, and sources of mystical power - to a workaday business; a business that is concerned with providing reasonable service to clients for a reasonable price, with rewarding innovation and creative thinking, with becoming more inclusive and accessible. Depending on your point of view, this may or may not be a good thing. "Some lawyers see Brill as a prophet," says Stephen Gillers, a law professor at New York University. "Others see him as the cause of all the evils that are currently besetting the profession."
And when it comes to Court TV, the judgment is equally controversial. Max Frankel, the "Word & Image" columnist for The New York Times Magazine, argues that cameras in the courtroom may pervert the legal process, blurring the defendant's right to a fair trial and leaving him or her vulnerable to a public hanging in the kangaroo court of the media. Others have argued that Court TV is too important to be left in the hands of someone like Brill, that it really ought to be a government-run operation.
But as the network continues to prove itself, those voices are dying out. Court TV has already profoundly altered our cultural landscape. It has rescued the courtroom from TV-land fantasy, bringing it directly into our living rooms. It spawned legions of Court TV junkies who may know more about the legal system than most first-year law students. It has opened up the legal process to public scrutiny and it has told great dramatic stories. With Court TV, Brill put access to the fundamental underpinning of our society - the law - back where it belongs: with us. And he did it with just a good idea, a camera, and a television set. Almost makes you think there's hope for the box yet.
