A ton of legal publishing by practicing lawyers has taken place over the last twenty years. Much of this publishing lies on a firm site, to help people looking for legal information and for SEO.
I had a conversation with a state bar association today about the LexBlog Library. I wanted to give them the opportunity to hear about the Library and see how they thought it might be advantageous to the bar, to the lawyers in their state, and to the public at large.
They asked some good questions that led to something I hadn’t really thought of before.
There is an awful lot of publishing taking place by lawyers that ends up on websites, and I don’t think lawyers look at it as publishing per se. But it is publishing. It’s helpful insight and commentary directed at the kind of clients they want to serve. It reflects particular expertise because they’ve been representing clients in that area.
But that content just sits there on a web page, often under a heading called “Content,” “News,” “Blog Posts,” or whatever. Over time it goes away. Websites get revised. The content can disappear entirely.
If the site was built in the last ten years or so by a website developer, everything tends to be treated as content marketing. How do we appear in the search engines? It hasn’t historically been thought of as publishing, as insight and commentary.
That’s what the LexBlog Library does. It provides an opportunity for those individual pieces of publishing to go into a library. The content can come through a state bar association site and flow right into the LexBlog Library. There, it gets memorialized. It’s going to be there forever. The lawyer has left a legacy with their publishing.
From the Library, that publishing flows out to places like legal research platforms — partners the LexBlog Library already has in place and will increase in number. That accomplishes a few different things.
If a lawyer has particular expertise in a subject in their state. Why not have that work on a legal research platform used by lawyers where it lasts forever and can be cited as secondary law, whether by other lawyers, by the judiciary, or by anyone else doing the research?
The other point is authority in the age of LLMs. Whether you go to Claude, Gemini, or ChatGPT, those LLMs are starved for authority. They’re looking to know who is authoritative on a subject.
A lawyer who has published work that lives in a law library such a the LexBlog Library, with over twenty years of authority and the Library’s legal research platform partners is going to demonstrate significant authority. Their publishing is going to be viewed as authoritative by LLMs versus publishing focused on SEO and the like.
And as I explained to the bar, the Library is open access. Lawyers can submit their publishing for the Library at no expense.
Like anything else, you learn by talking to people, and this was a good conversation for me.