Legal Publishing by Legal Professionals Needs Its Own Wayback Machine

The web has always been fragile. Links break. Platforms vanish. Companies get acquired, and once-vibrant archives of thought disappear overnight.

Look at Typepad’s announcement of about a week ago that it’s turning off the lights of its twenty-two year old publishing platform in thirty days.

Legal publishing is no different, maybe more vulnerable.

• Hosting sites for legal content are acquired or shut down.
• Law firms, guided by outside agencies, often discard their lawyers’ work in the name of “SEO” or redesign.
• New law firm websites launch and bury or erase years of lawyer-authored commentary.
• When lawyers move laterally, their body of work often vanishes with the flip of a switch.

This isn’t just an inconvenience. It’s the loss of secondary law—credible, citable insight that lawyers, academics, students, librarians, and the public rely on to understand how the law works in practice.

But there’s another reason preservation matters. Lawyers build a legacy and a name with a growing lifetime body of work. Every article, blog post, or commentary is part of their professional story. Preserving that work means preserving reputation, authority, and credibility. Without it, careers risk being reduced to scattered fragments rather than a visible arc of expertise.

Preservation isn’t just for lawyers. Consumers of legal services, whether in-house counsel, small business owners, or everyday people, need a better way to find trusted lawyers in the niches where they need help.

They deserve to see real voices, not just law firm “content marketing” written to game search rankings. By surfacing authentic lawyer-authored insight, we give clients a clearer path to selecting the right lawyer for their problem.

That’s why we continue building the LexBlog Network and its Library. Not just to showcase today’s legal commentary, but to preserve it. Every post, article, or insight published by a legal professional is part of the law’s digital legacy. Our responsibility to you and the public is to make sure it isn’t discarded.

Think of the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. It’s not just nostalgia, it proves the web has a history, and that history matters.

The same is true for the law. The LexBlog Library exists to ensure that for today, tomorrow and for decades from now, when people want to understand the evolution of a doctrine, an industry, or a case, they can find the voices of the lawyers who were there. They can find the lawyers to trust.

The law deserves its own Wayback Machine. Kind of cool to feel that’s what we’re building.