Lawyers could learn a lot from artists when it comes preserving the lawyer’s published work.
As Anna Trammel, Project Manager, Community Programs for the Internet Archive puts it,
“Artists today use their websites as more than a business card– they are an online portfolio, CV, document of artistic evolution, and works of art in their own right. They are valuable records of a life’s work, yet as with all technology, they are fragile and ephemeral. They can vanish overnight due to expiring domain registrations, server migrations, software obsolescence, or administrative access loss after the passing of an artist.
Art historians, critics, curators, and humanities scholars rely on artists’ records to understand and contextualize contemporary artistic practice. To support the accessibility and discoverability of these websites for art historical scholarship in the future, the Internet Archive’s Collaborative ART Archive (CARTA) program is working to preserve artists’ websites, ensuring that they endure as documents of an artist’s legacy.”
Lawyers, whether in a large or small firms, having international or rural reach, breathe life into primary law. For the courts, fellow lawyers and the public.
The published work of a publishing lawyer also represents a record of their life’s work.
Like an artist though, this published work can vanish overnight for any number of reasons including moving firms, changing website structure, and even deleting the published work.
Taking no action is going to result in the published works of lawyers being lost forever. If ever cited by courts or digitally by other publishers, the citation being lost forever generates a 404 error.
With The Library at LexBlog we’re working, via AI, to archive the published works of legal processionals. To raise what is too often looked at as content marketing to the status of secondary lawyer. We’ll get this insight into a library of secondary law, also serving as the legacy for the publishing lawyer.
With twenty years of digital publishing under the belt of legal professionals, we see the desire and need of an archive, the desire of legal professionals to leave a legacy.
“This could not come at a better time as I start to work on my artist legacy and I’m thinking of ways that my website can live on once I pass and won’t be able to pay the fees after a while. My website is an extremely important tool that I have used since 2005 when it was uploaded. It is a tool that I use daily and share with others, and helps me track my works, my exhibition history, my entire art career. As a mid-career LatinX artist and under represented, […] it will give me peace of mind that future generations could find my work as I designed and intend the public to view it.”
Rather than looking at your insight on niches in the law as content marketing to be of no value overtime, look at it as part of your life’s work and as secondary law a contribution to society. As other legal professionals are already doing, get your work in a library.