That bodes well for news organizations in general, he said.

I wondered about Gawker, which a Florida jury hit with a $140 million verdict in an invasion-of-privacy lawsuit last year. Without the financial wherewithal to fight on through the appeals process, its owners went into bankruptcy and sold to Univision.

But Mr. Abrams said, “I think Gawker would have won if it had had a chance to go higher.”

Juries, he said, have always shown a willingness to punish journalists — who are down there with lawyers in the public esteem rankings — just as appellate courts are often willing to reverse those juries. Mr. Trump’s anti-press remarks, he acknowledged, certainly do not help with the jury pool.

That’s not, however, Mr. Abrams’s chief area of worry.

“My concerns on the Trump level are more in two areas,” he said. “One, the potential use of the Espionage Act against journalists reporting on national security-related matters, and the other is leak investigations in which the journalists are called to testify.”

The Obama administration set the tone by bringing more cases against leakers than all of the administrations that preceded it combined, often by using the Espionage Act, which it invoked, for instance, in its attempt to obtain emails from the Fox News reporter James Rosen.

The headline on an op-ed that the New York Times correspondent James Risen wrote late last year was pointed in its assignment of blame: “If Donald Trump Targets Journalists, Thank Obama.”

The last administration spent about seven years seeking to compel Mr. Risen to testify in a criminal leak investigation involving classified information in his 2006 book, “State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration.”

Though it ultimately didn’t require him to testify — most likely for public relations reasons, Mr. Risen figures — it won the right to do so in the Fourth Circuit, where the United States Court of Appeals ruled that the First Amendment didn’t protect reporters from subpoenas to testify about “criminal conduct” that they “personally witnessed or participated in.”