Who Should We Be Talking To

If you’ve been following along, LexBlog is building a citable library of legal practitioner publishing. Strange part — some folks can’t see the value of such a library.

Twenty plus years ago, when lawyers started publishing online, nobody called it marketing. It was publishing. The goal was to build a name, build relationships — to develop business.

Somewhere along the way, publishing got labeled as “content marketing.” And with it, what legal publishing is and where it ends up.

As a society we now have over two million pieces of legal practitioner publishing — blog posts, insights, alerts, articles et al., authored by lawyers who know their areas of law deeply. A strong case can be made that this body of work is more valuable secondary law than what sits in law reviews. It’s more timely and it comes from practicing lawyers. And on some topics, where rights are being challenged or rolled back, this publishing is more important than ever to our society.

So LexBlog is building the LexBlog Library around it. Structured, citable, and verified, with author records modeled on how the Library of Congress handles authority records. Content found on legal research platforms, cited by judges and lawyers, surfaced by LLMs, and relied on by AI systems that need secondary law to interpret primary law.

Our library conversations often land with business development and marketing professionals at law firms. Good people. But they hear “library” and think analytics, clicks, citations back to the firm website. How many times will we be cited?

The lawyers who get it immediately? The ones who’ve used a law library — digital or the original kind — who researched as law students, clerks, and lawyers. They see the value of a practicing lawyer’s insight as secondary law, being cited, being available in legal research platforms like vLex, and being relied on by AI solutions and LLMs. This may be every lawyer.

These lawyers understand that practitioner publishing should not be valued solely on analytics nor deleted in website development work over a period of time. They understand what it means for that work to be preserved, searchable, structured, and citable.

The question I keep being asked is who should we be talking to. My answer tends to be those who use the law, see the value of our law, and perhaps want to support and grow a law library that’s of value to our society.