What If a Lawyer’s Published Work Could Be Cited Like a Law Review Article?
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Legal citations follow a rigid format that tells you exactly who said what, where it was published, and when.
Without proper citations, neither the court nor lawyers can cite a published work. Big reason that practitioner publishing, whether blogs, white papers or articles are not cited.
Here’s an example of a citation for a law review article: Jane Smith, The Future of Employment Arbitration, 95 Yale L.J. 230, 245 (2023). Author, title, volume, journal, page, pinpoint (specific page the cited material actually appears), year.
And an example for a treatise: 3 William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England § 4.2 (1768). Volume, author, title, section, year.
Now here’s the gap I was writing about regarding the lack of a citation system for legal practitioner publishing. If a lawyer wanted to cite Attorney Daniel Schwartz’s analysis of a Connecticut employment law ruling, there’s no standard format for it. What would it even look like?
Right now, the best you could do is something like: Daniel Schwartz, Title of Post, CT Employment Law Blog (Mar. 4, 2026), https://some-url-that-might-break. That’s a blog citation. Informal, no persistent identifier, no way to verify the author’s credentials, and the URL might be dead in two years.
What an Author Record makes possible is something closer to: Daniel Schwartz, Title of Post, LexBlog Library, Author Record No. LBL-00472, 647 works (2007–2026) (employment law, Connecticut). Now you’ve got a persistent identifier, a body of work count, practice area, jurisdiction, everything a court or research platform needs to assess the source.
I’m not going to claim perfection on legal citations, but things are starting to c;lick for me on where we’re heading with practitioner (lawyer, academic, law student, professional working for organization advancing the law).
I’m not going to claim perfection on legal citations, but things are starting to click on where we’re heading. Not just for lawyers, but with anyone producing substantive legal analysis: academics, law students, professionals at organizations advancing the law.“
With a single publisher leveraging AI, a database, and Author Records, we get legal practitioner publishing where it belongs. In a library, findable and citable by courts and lawyers.