Katrina Dewey
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.