It’s interesting when you start working on a cause in which you really believe that you start reaching out to people, most of whom you don’t know, to get feedback, insight and help.
I did it when I moved to Seattle 27 years ago to build a virtual legal community of people helping people, lawyers and lay people alike. There was no Google on which to find people you’d like to meet. I used magazines, asked people if they knew someone in Seattle, and asked the people I met if they knew someone else.
With LexBlog in 2004, we had the makings of a real Internet. No Linkedin, no social networks to speak of, but we had the ability to just get on the Internet and blog, by which some how people heard us. And we of course had the people we had met and become friends with while working on the net the last five years.
In 2026, I am doing it again. We’re building ‘The Library at LexBlog.” The reason being that no one preserves the published insight of legal professionals, nor structures it for citation as secondary law. I believe The Library at LexBlog will.
Legal professionals have been publishing insight and commentary online since LexBlog was founded more than twenty years ago. Much of the publishing is not being kept, though. When authors leave law firms, websites are rebuilt, publishing is purged for SEO reasons, or URLs change, that expertise is often lost with it.
Traditional legal publishing including primary law (codes, cases and regulations) and secondary law such as law reviews is preserved and cited by lawyers on behalf of their clients. The working insight of legal professionals, commentary explaining how the law actually operates, is not. Crazy that every major category of legal knowledge has citation infrastructure except practitioner commentary.
AI systems are going to increasingly interpret primary law. Without the insight and commentary of legal professionals, that interpretation risks lacking the practical authority and context through which the law actually operates.
A mouthful, certainly. Enough so that I seem to be reaching out to a person a day regarding this idea, the work we are doing on it and where we may need a little help.
Kind of amazing what you’ll do when you need a little help from a friend.