LinkedIn, Legal Publishing, and Authority in the Days of AI

Writing the last few days about publishing by legal practitioners in the age of AI got me thinking about whether a lawyer’s LinkedIn publishing (articles and posts) are ever cited by LLM’s, the result being enhanced authority. Such content has been found on Google.

The answer is generally no for AI.

LinkedIn posts live in a quick-moving feed, behind logins, with unstable URLs and no durable archive. AI systems favor open, stable, well-attributed sources. Things that look like libraries, not social streams.

Even when AI systems encounter LinkedIn content, the idea may be absorbed while the author is not. Weak authorship signals and no accumulated body of work tying a lawyer to a subject over time.

LinkedIn no doubt creates visibility and engagement, things valuable for a lawyer, but it does not produce durable authority signals for AI. The content is transient, weakly attributed, and not preserved in a way AI systems use publishing to establish who is authoritative and to be cited and sourced on a subject.

Gaining authority, critical for lawyers in the day of AI, requires permanence and attribution for LLM’s, digital legal libraries and legal publishing platforms.