The Library at LexBlog, on the back of AI, is preserving and structuring the published insight of legal professionals worldwide as citable secondary law.
Over one million published works from 73,000 professionals and 4,400 publications already. The publishing is expanding from blogs to articles, alerts, whitepapers and the like.
We’d be remiss if we did not talk to law firms for whom their publishing is not in the Library. The Library is open access, there’s no cost for a firm’s publishing to be in the Library. The publishing goes on to far reaching and authority building libraries such as HeinOnline. But who do we talk to? I am serious in asking.
Business development and marketing professionals look at published works by lawyers as content marketing, and often disposable. They are not necessarily charged with the use of AI for preservation, structure and citation as secondary law.
Who would understand the opportunity and need to have the publishing in such a Library? Understand any complexities and concerns regarding AI in publishing?
You could make a good case for librarians at law firms. Not a law librarian, nor in a law firm but Jose Ruiz-Vazquez, assistant manager at the Milwood Branch of Austin Public Library, put it very well that library skills translate to AI and the opportunities that come with AI.
From an article in the blog of the Library Development and Networking Division at the Texas State Library and Archives Commission.
“When people hear “AI governance,” they often imagine software engineers or computer scientists. Jose sees something different.
At its core, AI governance is about questions librarians already ask every day. How is information organized? What bias exists? Who has access? How do we help people make informed decisions?
Library science concepts such as controlled vocabulary, metadata, provenance, and information organization closely align with the challenges AI systems face. “Governance” may sound technical, but libraries already practice it regularly through policy creation, privacy considerations, intellectual access, and information stewardship.
“We do governance all the time,” Jose explained. “We just don’t call it that.” For example, librarians are trained to think critically about where information comes from and whether it is trustworthy. Those same instincts matter when evaluating AI outputs, identifying bias, or understanding what information an AI system uses to generate answers.
As Jose sees it, librarians’ expertise in findability and provenance positions them to educate people about ethical and transparent AI systems that better serve communities.”
When I ask law firm marketing professionals and law firm librarians how or if they work together, I am generally told there is little or no interaction.
Here’s an opportunity. Marketing and business development professionals looking to establish authority for their lawyers and their publishing – libraries are perfect for AI solutions looking for authority – and librarians looking at all the published works of fellow employees and wanting to see such publishing preserved, structured and cited.