Since the start, almost twenty years ago for LexBlog, I’ve thought of blogs as democratizing publishing for lawyers.
Rather than gatekeepers saying who gets to publish and who does not, any caring lawyer can share their insight to help people, while at the same time building a name for themselves.
No limit on who gets legal information. No limiting legal information to only those who pay for it.
A couple decades later and we have over a million legal blog posts from lawyers.
We need to take a couple more steps.
One, we need to crank up the number of legal blogs. We have legal deserts – by subject, locale and lawyers.
Legal blogs crack this nut in a couple ways. More relevant legal information into the deserts – by subject and locale – and more lawyers locating in the legal deserts knowing that blogging generates work on a broad geographic basis.
Two, we need to build more complete aggregated and curated bodies of legal insight from legal blogs – for other lawyers and the public.
In the form of a library and branch libraries, by subject and locale. And as a way to feed the blog copy into legal research and AI platforms. Blog posts are not only insight, but secondary law.
Legal blogs represent the raw materials.
There are any number of valuable solutions which could be built from legal blogs.
Putting a nice legal blogging platform in a lawyer’s hands for free, or at a very low cost, would accelerate things.
State bar associations approached LexBlog a number of years ago about building free websites for lawyers. The bars would pay something towards the cost.
Never came to fruition for a number of reasons.
Legal blogs are a much more noble cause than websites, as I look at it. Blogs can have much more of a positive impact for consumers, business people and the blogging lawyers.
Build the blogs in a way that it gives a lawyer everything they need for an effective Internet presence (better than a website), and now you have something for the blogging lawyers.
Just noodling on the subject and not envisioning giving away the full service blogging platform that our customers pay us for.