Subscribing to Legal Aid

Herpes, AIDS, IRS audits, Ed Meese’s Justice Department--a new journal, out this month, focuses on our worst legal nightmares.

Actually, Everyday Law, published monthly by the Assn. of Trial Lawyers of America, wants to help us sleep soundly despite such tribulations.

According to the magazine’s editor, Anne Grant, Everyday Law fills a gap on the newsstand where, seemingly, there is a mass circulation periodical devoted to every interest from airplanes to zoos. Everyday Law, she says, will offer “enjoyable and informative reading about day-to-day legal concerns.”

An Inspired Lawyer

The new publication is the inspiration of Tampa, Fla., attorney Bill Wagner, president-elect of the trial lawyers group. Picking up a copy of Pilot magazine at an airport sundries counter, he was struck by the fact that there was no special-interest consumer magazine devoted to the law. In May 1986, he proposed to the association’s board that the trial attorneys sponsor Everyday Law.

As Wagner saw it, the new magazine would inform readers about the impact of the law on their daily lives and provide an entertaining commentary on newsworthy cases. The primary goal would be to advise consumers on how to prevent legal problems and to redress those that could not be prevented.

“You don’t have to be a big corporation to have a need for the law process and to be affected by the law,” Wagner explained. “But too often people take the value of a lawful society for granted.” Too many people, he says, fail to understand how the legal system can help them.

Despite the usual problems associated with start-ups--in this case expressed in the form of awkward graphics and dated texts, Everday Law looks like a winner.

The subject matter is compelling, and Grant, who has managed national gazettes for the trial lawyers and the American Bar Assn., seems committed to the association’s mandate to “give you information you need in clear language that you’ll enjoy reading.”

Grant says each issue will have regular departments on work, money, taxes, and family law; reports on developments in federal and state courts and legislatures; Q&A; and “You Be The Jury” departments; how-to columns; a profile of a consumer advocacy organization; and an interview with a well-known personality connected with the law.

In the May issue, for example, the Honorable Joseph A. Wapner of television’s “People’s Court,” promoting his book “A View from the Bench,” is interviewed about the workings of small claims court. “The Attorney General: A Job Description” defines what is at stake in the current flap over Atty. Gen. Edwin Meese’s handling of the Justice Department. “Herpes, AIDS and Other Gifts from Friends” examines the liabilities of carriers of sexually transmitted diseases, while with typically lawyerly fairness a sidebar explains how to defend yourself if you are charged with infecting someone.

Consumer Lobby Profiled

A profile of the Consumer Federation of America shows how the public interest lobby affects congressional action on such issues as airline smoking regulations and the safety of all-terrain vehicles. Other pieces look at what to expect from product warranties and suggest ways to choose a lawyer, fight a job firing, steer clear of highway hazards, and win an argument with your bank. News items look at such topics as FDA regulations, automobile recalls, Australian hallucinogens, NFL free agency, credit card disclosure legislation, child care standards, sharing lottery winnings, and curtailing curfews.

The centerpiece of the May issue, “Taxpayers Under Siege,” reports shocking abuses of the IRS’ enforcement powers and offers advice on what to do if you are audited. A companion tax column describes efforts by U.S. Sen. David H. Pryor (D-Ark.) to pass a Taxpayers Bill of Rights to “prevent IRS auditors from practicing abusive and illegal collection practices and inform taxpayers of their rights.”

Because of the editors’ obsession with “readability”--they may be underestimating the audience somewhat--and because so much material is packed into 64 pages, the features tend to be relatively slight. Also, the magazine’s look, apparently reflecting the trade publication backgrounds of both Grant and managing editor Gary J. Logan (Beverage Retailer Weekly), will hamper circulation when the book competes on newsstands in the fall for the attention of increasingly graphics-sophisticated consumers.

In the meantime, while the magazine is available only to the approximately 20,000 charter subscribers, it carries an oddly busy cover design usually used solely by women’s magazines fighting for space by the checkout counter.

Everyday Law carries a cover price of $3; subscriptions are $19.95 from Everyday Law, 5615 W. Cermak Rd., Cicero, Ill. 60650.

One of the best publications aimed at students is the Santa Monica-based Fast Times. The 5-year-old monthly tabloid reaches 1.8 million students with serious issues in an accessible format, offering teen-agers and social studies teachers an effective medium for keeping up with current events.

The last issue, for example, included long pieces on Central America, the Armenian struggle in the Soviet Union, the Iran-Contra affair, and the effectiveness of magnet schools, in addition to film and record reviews. The inclusion of questions within the features and a glossary and quiz at the end of each issue enhance the publication’s usefulness in the classroom.

Although Fast Times carries many pages of advertising, from the likes of film and record companies, book publishers, banks and soft drink makers, many national companies, especially purveyors of life-style products such as clothes and cars, are reluctant to display their color ads on newsprint. Publisher Jeffrey Lederman has announced that the newspaper, which appears monthly during the school year, will introduce a twice-yearly Time-sized glossy called Fast Times Magazine “to give advertisers a choice of editorial environments within the classroom.” The slick magazine, a prototype of which appeared last fall to test its acceptance by teachers, is being shopped to advertisers during the summer hiatus and will appear as an insert in October and April beginning next year.

Copies of Fast Times (and accompanying teachers’ guides) are distributed free to teachers from P.O. Box 3391, Santa Monica 90403-0391.

ABC Consumer Magazines, the publishing arm of Capital Cities/ABC, Inc. (owners of High Fidelity and Los Angeles magazines, among others), will incorporate Opus classical record review magazine, recently acquired from Historical Times, Inc., of Harrisburg, Pa., into an expanded version of its Musical America (ironically, the venerable Musical America, now 90 years old, which concentrates on live classical music performances, itself spent many years as an insert in High Fidelity). High Fidelity’s classical music editor, Theodore W. Libbey Jr., will edit the Opus record review section.

The expanded Musical America, out next week, will be sent to the subscribers of both magazines, doubling the subscription base to nearly 30,000. The book will increase in size from 64 to 96 pages, and the cover price will drop by a dollar to $5. It should also be somewhat easier to find on newsstands.

You will want enclitic, a quarterly “review of the timely taken seriously,” founded at the University of Minnesota in 1976. Now published at USC by John O’Kane, a professor in the Comparative Literature Program, the journal, which started life as a highly academic expression of post-structuralist semiotics, has devolved into a classy, eclectic literary magazine, with a special interest in film. The current issue includes fiction by Beat novelist Hubert Selby, Jr., accompanying an interview by Bill Langenheim (Selby teaches in the USC Master’s in Professional Writing Program); and an estimation of recent Vietnam films by John Stevenson. Single copy, $5.; subscriptions, individual $14, institutional $36, from enclitic, Inc., 234 Taper Hall, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, Calif. 90089-0353.