It’s hard enough as the leader of a company to keep yourself and your team on vision. It’s harder still to pivot from the original vision to something new. But at some point, you have to. Because of an opportunity, an obligation to serve, or a marketplace that’s moving—which isn’t.
Over the last six months or more, I’ve been writing about the concept of a Library. Legal practitioners write about what the law means every day. Blogs, white papers, client alerts, insights, anything a lawyer puts into the world. The LexBlog Library brings all of it together in one place. Not just gathered, but structured. Marked up so that AI doesn’t see it as prose, but as authoritative legal commentary, with the metadata required for research platforms and AI systems to find it, cite it, and trust it.
The authority belongs to the author. The legal practitioner, academic, law student or other professional in an organization advancing the law writing something worth reading. The LexBlog Library is the vessel for that.
Every contributor gets an Author Record. A verified professional identity attached to their work. Law school, bar admissions, jurisdictions, practice areas, years of publishing, areas of expertise. This isn’t a profile. It’s a credential that travels with the work into the future.
The content that comes in gets screened. This isn’t random content marketing, it’s practitioner insight that meets a standard. That distinction is what makes the Library valuable. Valuable to the legal web, to LLMs ingesting legal content, and most importantly to the legal research companies building AI solutions lawyers rely on.
Those companies are the ones who can bridge the gap between primary law and the expert analysis that makes sense of it. Cases, codes, regulations on one side. Practitioner commentary that explains what it all means on the other. The LexBlog Library gives them the structured, authoritative secondary law to do that.
LLMs are only as good as what they ingest. Without something like the LexBlog Library, the legal writing AI digests may be nothing more than noise.
We’ve been in legal publishing for 21 years. We’re not leaving that behind. Blog platforms, microsites and network solutions built on a managed WordPress platform for law will continue. The Library doesn’t replace publishing. It’s what publishing has been building toward.
There’s a moment that offers opportunity here. A huge amount of unorganized legal insight, the need for structured legal content with authority markup, the ability to use AI to do so and the ability to use the AI solutions for legal research by lawyers and the public.
As James Earl Jones said, “There comes a time when all the cosmic tumblers have clicked into place and the universe opens itself up for a few seconds to show you what’s possible.”
Hey, I’ll always be a Field of Dreams fan.