The Newswatch bot.

What it is

Newswatch tracks the Big Law market: lateral moves, partner promotions, office openings, mergers, associate pay and practice trends across the US, Europe, Asia and the Middle East. The crawler reads public news feeds, sitemaps and news pages, mostly legal trade press and law firm newsrooms, to find those stories. Our editors review every item before we publish it, and each published item links back to the outlets that reported it.

How to recognise it

Every request carries this User-Agent:

VargasPartnersNewswatch/1.0 (+https://vargaspartners.com/newswatch-bot)

It does not identify itself as a browser or as any AI training crawler.

How often it visits

• RSS and Atom feeds: every 15 to 60 minutes, adjusted to how often the feed changes.
• Law firm newsrooms and sitemaps: about every 3 hours.
• Never more than one request to the same host every 5 seconds, or slower if you ask.
• Conditional requests (If-None-Match / If-Modified-Since), so an unchanged page costs you a 304 and no body.
• It backs off on errors and stops polling a source that blocks it.

What it respects

• robots.txt, including Crawl-delay. DisallowVargasPartnersNewswatch and it stays away.
• Paywalls and logins. It never bypasses them. It reads only what any visitor can read without an account, and never tries to get round bot protection.
• Your content. We publish short factual summaries in our own words with a link to your story, never copies of your articles.

Opt out, or ask us to use your feed

To block the bot, add this to your robots.txt:

User-agent: VargasPartnersNewswatch
Disallow: /

Or email hello@vargaspartners.com and we will remove your site by hand. If you publish a news or press-release feed you would like us to read instead of your pages, send us the URL at the same address.

Search

To discover stories, Newswatch may also use the Brave Search API. Search results powered by Brave Search.