ALM’s Law.com now indexing all legal blogs : Significant development in legal publishing

American Lawyer Media – ALM – is now indexing all legal blogs so that such law blog content is included in search results at ALM’s Law.com website right along with legal news reported by ALM’s reporters.

Doing a search for Martindale-Hubbell this morning, the first four results displayed are from legal blogs not affiliated with ALM in anyway. It was not until the fourth result did I find an ALM published piece.

What’s the significance?

• ALM, a traditional legal publisher (National Law Journal and 34 other national and regional legal periodicals), is recognizing the importance of legal content published by bloggers.
• ALM recognizing that legal blogs, other than those selected by ALM’s Law.com Blog Network, are of equal or greater importance than those in this network which the unknowing have labeled the best legal blogs.
• Legal research of a legal index that did not include legal blogs would be incomplete.
• Lawyers may self-publish via a blog without submitting articles to legal publications. Their content will be seen along side content published by legal periodicals.
• ALM, and its owner Incisive Media, recognizing that user generated content may be as important as their own content in the well being of their publications.
• Law.com could become a legal information center with more content produced by practicing lawyers, law professors, and law students than ALM’s own reporters and editors.

Still some important features missing, such as the ability to subscribe to search results by RSS, but this is a good start for blogs at ALM.