Why Lawyers Put Their Work in Libraries

Working on the LexBlog Library, a worldwide collection of legal insight and commentary authored by legal practitioners, academics, law students, and other legal professionals contributing to the advancement of the law, the question came up as to why lawyers would contribute their publishing.

People assumed it was to expand reach and visibility. I wasn’t so sure, so I looked to authors and libraries, generally.

Authors place their work in libraries because libraries preserve it. The books in the ten-story Seattle Public Library across the street from me are no longer tied to a sales cycle, yet they are catalogued so they can be accessed as needed. Books become part of an author’s professional and historical record.

Libraries signal that one’s work is serious and credible enough to be collected, referenced, and relied upon.

That same analogy, authors and libraries, applies well to why legal practitioners and other legal professionals contribute their publishing to a library.

Until now, no one preserved their publishing. Lawyers relied on Google and marketing companies to surface and preserve their work. Many law firms delete years of lawyer-authored publishing whether lawyers stayed in the firm or not — and without notice to the lawyers.

Rather than promotion, we need to care about service and access to the law, especially when the effort required to contribute publishing is minimal.

Lawyers, students, researchers, and the public rely on libraries not for what’s trending, but for what’s useful when the need arises.

No question, reach happens. But it happens over time, not through clicks or traffic. Library reach is citation-driven and long-lived. Today, it increasingly extends to AI-assisted legal research platforms that draw on secondary law to interpret and give context to primary law.

Marketing and reach are fine. Libraries are complementary.

Libraries focus on preservation, attribution, continuity, and trust. They ensure that serious work remains available, citable, and usable, today and long term.

When work is preserved in a library, it gains permanence. It becomes citable. It becomes usable by other lawyers, judges, academics, students, and researchers. Increasingly, it also becomes usable by AI-assisted legal research platforms that rely on secondary law to interpret and give context to primary law. Publishing in credible libraries is also more likely to be ingested and indexed by LLMs and legal research platforms.

The answer as to why legal professionals submit their publishing to a legal library is simple. It’s the same reason authors place their work in libraries—not for marketing, but to establish authority, preserve and legitimize it, and place their publishing in service of the law and the public over time.