What Would Be Lost if LexBlog and the Open Legal Blog Archive Were No More?

What would be lost if LexBlog and the Open Legal Blog Archive were no more?

I couldn’t help but reflect on this while listening to a recent NPR interview where Mary Louise Kelly spoke with Brewster Kahle, the founder of the Internet Archive. They discussed a cyberattack that temporarily took the Archive, including its Wayback Machine, offline for days—and what could have been lost had the attack succeeded.

The Archive’s work transcends simple data storage—it serves as a digital library preserving web pages, books, music, videos, and decades of television. Its existence ensures that historical moments, cultural milestones, and intellectual works remain accessible to future generations. Losing the Archive would mean erasing a vital part of society’s collective memory, jeopardizing our ability to look back and learn.

Kahle described the organization’s unwavering commitment to preserving digital history, emphasizing that their mission is “tattooed into their souls.”

LexBlog brought blogging to the law and with the Open Legal Blog Archive, supported by LexBlog, archives, as of today, 798,000 blogs posts, authored by 58,000 authors on 2,900 legal blogs.

This archive grows daily in posts, authors and blogs. Blog submissions are screened to eliminate “blogs” produced solely for content marketing versus credible legal information, insight and commentary.

The Internet Archive’s steadfast dedication to preservation and access reminds people of the profound societal value of protecting our shared digital heritage.

In the case of the Open Legal Blog Archive, we’re reminded of the profound legal insight and information generated by lawyers on blogs – and that we must protect this digital heritage for the lawyers themselves as well as for secondary law.

While no data was lost by the Internet Archive – and the Open Legal Blog Archive was not attacked in recent cyber attacks on libraries, attacks on digital archives highlight the work and dedication needed to safeguard knowledge.

And the like the Internet Archive, we at LexBlog and the Open Legal Blog Archive have an unwavering commitment to preserve legal blogs.