The Press Release a Reporter Will Cover.

Most litigation press releases are written for the client’s own files, not for a reporter’s inbox. You can tell within the first sentence — it opens with the law firm’s name and the cause number, not with the reason anyone outside the case would care.

A reporter reads many releases a day and decides in the first line whether to keep reading. The releases that get covered lead with the news, not the litigants: what happened, what’s new about it, why it matters beyond this one case. The firm name, the filing details, the standard closing text — all of that belongs after the opening, not instead of one.

What I check before one goes out

Would this stand up as the first paragraph of a wire story, not just a release? Is there a specific, sourced fact a reporter can verify independently, not just a claim? Is there a person — a plaintiff, an expert, someone quotable — a reporter can call? A release that fails any of those three tests gets rewritten before it goes anywhere, because a release a reporter can’t use is a release that changes nothing.