How many of you remember RealCorporateLawyer.com? I sure do. It was my first website – and I launched it twenty-five years ago today. I left the SEC at the end of ’98, having been sort of the “Internet guy” within Corp Fin for a few years – handling a lot of issues related to how this new thing called “the Web” impacted the securities laws. I was writing articles on the subject, doing speaking gigs, answering a lot of questions.
I went in-house to Lockheed Martin – and at night, I slowly started fleshing out a set of FAQs about all the various Internet-securities laws topics that I was well-versed in – so that I could share my knowledge with the community. My goal was to build a free website with the content. At the time, there wasn’t any one single site devoted to covering Corp Fin topics. Things were still mostly being done by paper in the late ‘90s.
Right before I went to Lockheed Martin, I agreed to meet with a high-ranking officer from RR Donnelley to explain the nature of the “aircraft carrier” since I was closely familiar with that rulemaking since I evaluated it in my role as Counselor to one of the SEC Commissioners at the time – the “aircraft carrier” was a comprehensive disclosure reform package that the SEC had just proposed. Turned out that RR Donnelley liked my personality, my character and they wanted to hire me in a sales capacity.
I was curious about what working in sales would be like – not to mention all the premium tickets to sporting events available in the job during that era – but I also wanted to be creative and serve in a marketing role. So I had one condition: I wanted the freedom to launch my own site with the FAQs I had been drafting.
They agreed – except they wanted to buy this unlaunched site. That startled me. Although it shouldn’t have a surprise because some people were telling me to keep the site and go public with it. Do an IPO. Which seemed ludicrous because there was no site yet, just a Word document with 100 pages of content. Not enough even for a paperback. An IPO? That’s how crazy the Internet boom was before it went poof a few years later.
So I finally agreed to sell them 49% of the site – and I went to work for RR Donnelley. It took another year to build the site – that’s how hard it was to find someone available who could code HTML and build a site back then. Today, it might take a few days to launch something so simple. The whole thing is laughable in hindsight.
I then came up with the name for the site one night at a friend’s house – and of course, I printed some t-shirts. You’ve always got to have t-shirts when you launch a site – and the shirts were simple. Plain white shirts with www.realcorporatelawyer.com on them. Back then, people still said the “www” when they mentioned a site.
The site was launched in February 2021 as a free site. I added a blog on the site about 15 months later. I was one of the first lawyers to blog – in May of 2002 – which is wild because there were almost no blogs out there at the time on any topic. I had read about “blogs” in an Internet-themed magazine and it described how they were akin to diaries. And I thought, “who would want to read my diary?” I had a college kid interning for me and I had him install the blogging software – not a turnkey task back then like it is now – and I started pushing out some rudimentary stuff to start. There were no examples to follow to inform me about “how to blog.” I was just making it up as I went along.
When I moved over to TheCorporateCounsel.net, I brought over the blog content from RealCorporateLawyer.com and you can still read those initial blog entries from 2002…
Authored by
Broc Romanek