The Nation’s Leading Publisher of Sports Law Periodicals Will Share the Podcast Across All of Its Platforms, Bringing Recognition to Leaders in the Sports Law Industry.
Hackney Publications has announced that it will introduce its first podcast – Sports Law Expert, which will regularly feature insights from leaders in the sports law industry, on November 15.
Among the initial guests will be:
- Carla Varriale-Barker, of Segal McCambridge
- Richard Giller, of Greenspoon Marder
- Matthew Eisler, of Hogan Lovells
- John Tyrrell, of Ricci Tyrrell Johnson & Grey
“There are hundreds of sports lawyers, professors and other legal experts that Hackney Publications has worked with and profiled through the years who have a fantastic story to tell,” said Holt Hackney, the founder and publisher of Hackney Publications. “One by one we will interview them and share that story.”
To be notified when the podcast, which will be published twice a month, goes live, visit here.
It will be promoted across various periodicals, such as Sports Litigation Alert (Alert), which has been a staple of the sports law industry for two decades.
“The Alert, thanks to its searchable archive of more than 4,000 case summaries and articles, has experienced extraordinary growth over the last five years in higher education,” said Hackney. “By promoting these podcasts and making them available in the archive, we expect that growth to continue.”
Among the subscribers to the Alert are law firms, leagues, teams, associations, and conferences. However, one of the biggest areas of growth has been higher education, where the Alert is read by more than 25,000 professors and students any given semester.
Adding the podcast feature is just one of many ways Hackney Publications has reached out to help professors teach the next generation of sports lawyers.
“It is a challenge in sports law classes because legal developments highlighted in textbooks become old news by the first day of class,” said Hackney, a life-long journalist who has been covering sports business and sports law for more than three decades. “The Alert solves that problem, since it publishes every two weeks, featuring five case summaries and eight to 12 articles. The podcasts will also be timely, publishing within two months after they have been recorded.”
Other Tools Make the Alert a Professor’s Best Friend
Hackney added that “use of the Alert would be even broader, except for the fact that the content in each issue does not track the syllabus or text. The Alert reports on news as it happens in the industry.”
To remedy this, Hackney Publications has piloted a program for professors over the last two years where it provides participating professors with 12 subject-matter compendiums at the beginning of the semester. These are created by pulling material from the last six months of Alerts. Among the dozen topics are Title IX/gender equity, negligence/assumption of risk, antitrust, and contracts.
“These compendiums, which professors share with students, more closely mirror the syllabus or textbook,” said Hackney. “This was really the missing piece.”
This is not the only tool provided by Hackney Publications to professors.
“We also provide a set of questions and answers for each of the five case summaries that professors can use to ensure that students are absorbing the material,” said Hackney. “These are just two of the ways professors are using the Alert.
“There are many others, which were highlighted, in part, by former sports law professor Linda Sharp in a recent article here.”
Hackney Publications has also gone to great lengths to introduce flexible subscription models.
First, libraries can subscribe, either directly through Hackney Publications or subscriptions services like EBSCO and W.S. Hein. The company makes the issues as well as the searchable archive of more than 3,000 case summaries and articles available to the library’s network.
Second, Hackney Publications offers academic subscriptions to professors for personal use. With such subscriptions, professors receive the issues every two weeks and have access to the searchable archive. Subscriptions to the Alert offer a great way for professors to track what is going on in the industry and being to access a robust archive or original case summaries and articles.
Third, Hackney Publications provides a complimentary subscription program when professors fully embrace the Alert and ask their students to subscribe at a student rate of $15 a semester. Professors implement the program by either passing out a URL at the beginning of the semester, or by making the subscription a class fee, where the college and university collects the fee and remits payment to Hackney Publications.
All subscriptions can be started here: https://sportslitigationalert.com/subscriptions/
“The class fee concept has become extremely popular over the last couple years,” said Hackney. “This has happened in parallel with the fact that the Alert has become more intertwined with the syllabus and/or textbook.”
