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Object to a Legal Blog Archive?

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August 23, 2021

Object to a legal blog archive? C’mon.

Archiving legal blogs is a no brainer.

  • Like law journals and law reviews before them, legal blogs represent secondary law.
  • Legal blogs are being deleted, leaving gaps in the law and leaving citations without a source.
  • An archive represents a library of research for lawyers and the public.
  • An archive gives visibility to the legal professionals giving of themselves by publishing blogs.

Yet some lawyers and law firms, on their behalf, are objecting to their legal blogs being included the Open Legal Blog Archive. Or perhaps better put, ignoring a request that their blogs be included in the Archive.

LexBlog, as a backer of the Legal Blog Archive Project, has, to date, focused on recruiting blogs from larger law firms (AmLaw 200). Lawyers at these firms publish over thirteen-hundred blogs.

Most of these blogs are now in the Archive.

But there are about thirty law firms, some of whom have twenty or more blogs, who have failed to respond to our request for the inclusion of their blogs.

A little perplexing when there is no cost or work involved.

The lawyers publishing these blogs can’t be aware that their blogs are being excluded from a legal blog archive because of their firm’s inaction. An archive including their peer’s blogs and being syndicated to legal research and AI platforms.

Legal librarians and information management professionals at these firms cannot aware that their firm’s blogs are being excluded from a legal blog archive.

These professionals pay hundreds of thousands, and in some cases millions, of dollars for legal research products to access law and ancillary products behind paywalls. As a result, legal librarians and information management professionals are very supportive of open law resources.

Most of the people we have contacted have been business development and marketing professionals.

Understandably, these professionals may not appreciate the role that secondary law, including blogs, plays in advancing the law, research and litigation. These folks are also awfully busy.

Fortunate for the Project, most lawyers and law firms see the Open Legal Blog Project as a no brainer. The objections, so far, may come from a lack of understanding of what the Archive represents and even a lack of time to review the Archive’s merits.