A leading legal publishing and technology executive, whom most of you would know, told me Friday that the strongest thing the Library at LexBlog has going for it is authority. The authority a legal professional would receive via their digital publishing being included in the Library and the authority the publishing itself would receive by being included in the Library.
AI is starved for authority, whether it be in regard to an LLM or a legal research platform or an AI powered legal tech solution. AI is only going to be as good as the data it is trained on. Just look at all the hallucinations lawyers receive from AI running on less than authoritative data.
For the last fifteen plus years most publishing lawyers and law firms have chased SEO, rankings and analytics.
That’s changing, with authority being sought over search rankings. One way to achieve authority being a library.
Rafael Ball, Director of the ETH Library in Zurich, writes that “today the library is indispensable as a bridge builder” in scholarly communication. He further writes that now more than ever the library serves as a “neutral authority.”
A library does not make a lawyer the authority, nor does it endorse what a lawyer publishes.
What it does do is verify authorship, preserve the work, organize it, make it discoverable, maintain it as part of the scholarly record, and provide a stable framework for citation.
In a world where AI is hungry for authoritative sources, those things matter.
Who would have thought three or four years ago that a library could play such a role in helping lawyers build authority? A lot has changed in a few years.
As AI changes how legal information is discovered, researched, and relied upon, being included in a trusted legal library may prove more valuable than a high search ranking ever was.