Skip to content

Law Librarians Interest in Legal Blogs is Growing

August 17, 2022

From everything I am seeing and hearing, the interest of law librarians in legal blogs is only continuing to grow.

The result will be a role for law librarians in the publishing and indexing of this secondary law.

I was on a call this morning with a group of highly experienced law firm librarians. The topic was legal blogs.

My interaction – which is a real joy – with law librarians has taken off since the launch of the Open Legal Blog Archive, backed by LexBlog.

The idea of Archiving and recognizing legal blogs as trusted legal insight and commentary has proven real attractive to law librarians.

In today’s call I heard, among other things, the following.

  • Legal blogs, well written by experienced lawyers do not necessarily require the editing traditional legal publishers say is required for a trusted legal publication.
  • An open body of law blogs represents an accessible library of free legal information, something that could reduce the spend that law librarians are incurring in paying for legal content behind paywalls.
  • A well constructed archive of legal blogs would further incent lawyers – both practicing and academics – to blog.
  • An indexing system, as part of the Archive, enabling the citation of legal blogs would increase the importance of legal blogs and the citation of blogs – and reduce broken links.
  • Law librarians can play as big role in supporting the blogging of law firms. Law librarians have as much data on trends and the like as anyone in the law firm.
  • We are interested in legal blogs and the Archive. Enough so to help in the development of the Archive.

At the end of the call, I mentioned the piece this week from large law firm librarian and veteran law blogger, Jean O’Grady about the changing roll of the law librarian.

The  law library has been in a process of deconstruction. Over the past decades codes, cases and commentary have been untethered from print. Now algorithms and analytics surface patterns of data extracted from commercial and internal sources.

O’Grady wasn’t referencing legal blogs, per se, but as a long time legal blogger, she knows the importance and influence of legal blogs.

Who knows. As a result of this deconstruction, maybe law librarians are part of an evolution where they help create and index a new secondary law.