Staff
katrina@lawdragon.com | (310) 850-1718
Chief Executive Officer Katrina Dewey founded Lawdragon in 2005 to use the power of the Internet to provide free, high quality legal news to an infinite audience of people interested in the law. She is a leading advocate for greater transparency and openness in the law, which has been the defining goal of her 26 years in law and journalism.
Katrina transformed the Los Angeles Daily Journal from a traditional trade paper focused on delivering summaries of court decisions to a vibrant, award winning newspaper with a staff of 100 reporters, editors and photographers during her tenure as Editor from 1996 to 2005. During that time, the Daily Journal was recognized for its reporting on the abuse of children by Catholic priests, failures of the Los Angeles foster care system, abuses of immigrants in INS detention, political machinations in the judicial appointment process and failures of law firms. Daily Journal reporters were recognized with more awards than any other small newspaper in California under her leadership, including an unprecedented five consecutive “Journalist of the Year” awards.
She began her career at the Daily Journal in 1989, after briefly practicing law in Los Angeles. Though she had no journalism experience, her determination to become a reporter and write about lawyers and the law rather than practice it secured her an entry level job as a cub reporter. She quickly ascended the editorial ranks with her reporting on California law practice, including law firm dissolutions, mergers and layoffs. She established trademark Daily Journal lists, including Rainmakers and the Top 100. She also was a writer for and on the editorial advisory board of California Lawyer magazine and served as the editor of four weekly legal newspapers in Arizona, Colorado, Nevada and Washington.
While at the Daily Journal, she also founded Behind the Wall, a literacy and journalism volunteer effort at Camp Gonzales in Calabasas, Calif. She worked with juvenile detainees to write monthly newspapers about their lives before incarceration and during their detention.
Katrina is from Gibson City, a town of 3500 people in Central Illinois. She received her B.S. With honors in Economics from Illinois State University and her J.D from the University of Chicago Law School in 1986.
john@lawdragon.com | (646) 241-5427
John Ryan, Co-Founder and Editor-in-Chief, manages Lawdragon’s web and print operations. He has more than two decades of experience in project management, content strategy, website and database development, branding and marketing, and business planning associated with editorial and sponsored content products. John facilitates interaction between the content, technology and business components of the company, both with staff and outside service providers.
John also has won numerous accolades for his legal affairs journalism over the the years, both at Lawdragon for his coverage of Guantanamo Bay and previously as a reporter for the Los Angeles Daily Journal. He has an MA in human rights studies from New York University and a BA from Colby College in Waterville, Maine.
carlton@lawdragon.com | (732) 407-2923
Vice President for Business Development, Carlton Dyce is a driven, results oriented leader with 30+ years of legal publishing experience and over 35 years of broad publishing experience covering customer experience strategies, business development and operations management.
Carlton’s experience includes: VP – CX and New Business at American Registry; GM of Martindale-Hubbell’s Lawyer Ratings group, VP Global Strategy for Martindale-Hubbell International and Sr. Director – MH Editorial and Customer Support. As head of the MH Lawyer Ratings group, he successfully launched their Top Lawyers Program which aligned the MH Lawyer ratings brand with Fortune magazine; American Lawyer Media and over 23 regional magazines across the country. For more than ten years, he supervised the production of the Martindale-Hubbell database, including data and directory development for Martindale.com and Lawyers.com, and he was instrumental in transitioning the editorial process from print-focused to web-focused.
Carlton has a proven track record of driving change and building business relationships all aimed at achieving visible results. He is among the most respectedbusiness executives in legal publishing and a hands on marketing machine. His experiences have provided him with a multicultural awareness and he communicates sensitively and efficiently across cultural divides.
Carlton holds an AA in Sales, a BA in Marketing and a MA in Organizational Management.
Memorable moments in Senior Editor James Langford’s career include walking underneath NASA’s shuttle Discovery as it prepared for a mission at Kennedy Space Center, interviewing R&B singer James Brown and navigating downtown New York City without the aid of traffic lights in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy. He has more than two decades of experience in print, digital and video platforms and has led coverage of financial markets and legal affairs for news organizations from FOX Business to TheStreet Inc. and Bloomberg News. James has a bachelor’s degree in journalism and marketing from the University of South Carolina-Aiken, and has won awards for investigative coverage of law enforcement and child welfare. His first reporting job was at The Augusta (Ga.) Chronicle, where he occasionally wrote about the Master’s Tournament but never actually set foot on the Augusta National’s grounds. He served on a jury for the first time in 2011. Follow him on Twitter @jayelang.
Michelle Fox is Lawdragon’s Web Services administrator. She handles client services and assists with creation and positioning of client profiles, as well as other web-related services. She is also an administrative contact for the Lawdragon lists. She is a graduate of the University of Southern California and worked as litigation paralegal for several large Los Angeles law firms.
Assistant Editor Emily Jackoway is a lover of language in all its facets. She is a writer for Lawdragon's Lawyer Limelight series, in which she frequently profiles members of the Lawdragon Hall of Fame. In that role, she utilizes her background in an array of storytelling capacities. Her experience includes writing for an internationally acclaimed literary education website, as well as creating and producing the site's podcast. Emily holds a BA in English Literature from New York University and a BFA in Theatre from NYU's Tisch School of the Arts. She finds interviewing lawyers to be an exciting fusion of the two disciplines.