15 Apr Here’s How Dan Abrams Used His Law Degree to Create a Media Empire

Columbia Magazine recently reported on the trajectory of Dan Abrams’s career and how he has utilized his law degree from the university to create a media empire.

As reporter Rebecca Shapiro wrote, throughout his career, Abrams, a graduate of Columbia Law School class of ’92, has channeled his ability to translate difficult concepts, particularly regarding law, into common, digestible terms.

“I think the key to success is knowing your strengths,” he recently told Shapiro. “I was a decent law student. I would have been decent at practicing law. But I realized early on, that’s not what I’m great at. What I am great at is explaining the law in a way that anyone can understand.”

In his on-air career, Abrams has been a court reporter and legal analyst on prominent networks like ABC, MSNBC, and NewsNation. He is currently the Chief Legal Analyst for ABC and hosts a daily radio show on SiriusXM’s POTUS channel, which is also a weekly podcast and segments of which air on Mediaite’s YouTube channel.

Additionally, he’s authored six best-selling books about history’s forgotten trials and is the founder and owner of Abrams Media, which includes prominent media and politics site, Mediaite, and the largest multi-platform spirits media company, Bottle Raiders.

Shapiro reported that much of his approach is inspired by his own father, Floyd Abrams, who is a First Amendment lawyer known for taking on high-profile cases, such as serving as co-counsel to The New York Times on the Pentagon Papers case in 1971. In total, he has argued thirteen cases in front of the Supreme Court.

“I approach my job the same way I would approach explaining a complicated Supreme Court case to my twelve-year-old son,” Abrams told Columbia Magazine. “It’s something I learned from my own dad.”

While Abrams told Columbia Magazine that it was always clear his sister, Ronnie (who is now a judge on the US District Court for the Southern District of New York), would follow in their dad’s footsteps, he wasn’t as sure of his own path.

Abrams began by studying political science at Duke University, where he also anchored for the campus television station. He then took a year off, traveling and surfing, while he applied to law school. That’s how he got to Columbia.

During his second year in law school, cable-news station Court TV launched. Abrams asked Willkie Farr & Gallagher to put his full-time job offer on hold for a year.

In 1992, he started working at Court TV as a production assistant. After 18 months, he was promoted to the role of reporter. Not long after, O.J. Simpson was arrested and put on trial, and Abrams was asked to cover it.

“I was in over my head,” Abrams told Shapiro for Columbia Magazine. “People were coming to me to make sense of the legal issues, and I was two years out of law school. I had never been in a courtroom before.”

His career took off, launched by his reporting from Simpson’s courtroom.

After a time at NBC, he moved to MSNBC for what he explained to Columbia Magazine was his dream job: hosting his own legal affairs show, The Abrams Report, which ran for five years.

Following a period, in which he also served as the general manager of MSNBC, Abrams got ready to launch Abrams Media in 2009.

“I wanted to create something from scratch,” Abrams said to Shapiro. “I wanted to be able to make changes, to be nimble, to pivot without checking with a ton of people.”

Thus came Mediaite, a website that uses media as a lens through which to explore and understand politics. The site garnered 84 million monthly visitors during the 2024 election.

He has launched more than a dozen sites and sold four of them, including Law&Crime, which sold in a nine-figure deal.

In 2020, Abrams launched Whiskey Raiders, a website and app that rates whiskeys, followed by Gin Raiders, Tequila Raiders, and Rum Raiders. He has since united them under the umbrella company, Bottle Raiders.

“The businesses that have done best have tended to be the ones where I’m personally passionate about the subject matter,” Abrams said in the interview. “That’s certainly true of Bottle Raiders.”

He is continuing to pursue his passions—and turn them into successful businesses.

“I was recently talking to a friend in his eighties, someone very wealthy and successful. He told me that the one regret he had was that he was so focused on success, he didn’t enjoy his life more,” Abrams told Shapiro. “I’m committed to not regretting anything.”