WSJ names new reporters for legal beat

Joanna Chung, the Wall Street Journal bureau chief for legal coverage, sent out the following staff announcement on Wednesday:

We’re pleased to announce new appointments to the Journal’s Law Bureau.

Jacob Gershman, who logs in as the WSJ Law Blogger and legal reporter, joins the group from the Journal’s Greater New York section, where he covered the roller-coaster politics of New York State. He led the pack in breaking news, being the first to report on Governor Andrew Cuomo’s shift in tax policy and pressures on Albany from interest groups ranging from shale drilling companies to casinos. He also exposed the little-noticed tax on “sliced” bagels. Jacob previously wrote for New York magazine and the New York Post and covered higher education at the New York Sun. Jacob, originally from Maryland, graduated from the University of Chicago.

Joe Palazzolo, who had been the Law Blogger since October 2011, will now cover national legal news. At the blog, he penned more than 1,000 posts and answered such burning questions as whether sending false tweets during Superstorm Sandy could be a prosecutable offense. He also broke a number of stories about companies being investigated for bribery overseas, and dug through homicide data to unearth a pattern of civilians increasingly killing each other in states with “stand your ground” laws. He also illuminated struggles in the legal industry, including a data-driven scoop that law school students had little better than a 50-50 shot of landing a job as lawyers. Joe graduated from St. Louis University and the University of Maryland.

Dan Strumpf, who is on secondment from the energy team at Dow Jones Newswires, has helped keep the paper ahead on the courts beat. Dan jumped into legal reporting after covering the oil and gas markets for Dow Jones and the auto industry at the Associated Press, where he wrote about the fall of General Motors. From the courthouse, he has most recently covered legal developments related to the government’s ongoing insider trading probes, and chronicled the latest twists in the Madoff scandal and the MF Global debacle. Dan has a degree from Northwestern University and plays the violin in the Brooklyn Symphony Orchestra.

Please join us in welcoming these reporters to their new beats.