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Real Lawyers Have Blogs

Law Librarians Have a Plan for AI. The Publishing of Legal Practitioners Is Not In It.

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cute robot reading book robotic character sitting at workplace desk studying artificial intelligence technology education concept modern library interior flat horizontal vector illustration

By Kevin O’Keefe

Skimming Google News for articles on AI and law libraries, I came across a white paper published last October: Building the Future of Law Libraries: Artificial Intelligence, Opportunities, and Advancement by Cas Laskowski, Associate Librarian and Head of Research, Data & Instruction at the James E. Rogers College of Law at the University of Arizona, and six senior law librarian colleagues from Stanford, Northwestern, Pittsburgh, South Carolina, and Suffolk.

They recognized AI was going to change legal research whether law librarians acted or not. So they acted with a plan.

Three pieces:

  1. Build a central organization to coordinate law librarians.
  2. Train legal information professionals at all levels to develop, test, and deploy AI responsibly.
  3. Start up a shared knowledge hub: policies, curricula, evaluation protocols, model contracts, case studies.

I was struck by a few things in reading the study. As things stood now, the publishing of legal practitioners – articles, blogs white papers, alerts – would never be in law libraries. 20 years of publishing, over 2 million pieces. Never part of the systems to be developed by the above law librarians.

And two, the efforts of the LexBlog Library, be it far from the force of law librarians, nationwide, was also looking to develop an AI driven system for law libraries.

Third, the LexBlog Library is also built in three steps.

  1. Recognize and gather the publishing of legal practitioners that qualifies as secondary law.
  2. Build Author Records. Persistent, structured identity records for the lawyers writing the law’s commentary, modeled on Library of Congress authority records.
  3. Deliver a licensable feed of structured practitioner content to legal research platforms and AI systems. 

The law librarians are organizing legal research, and the use of it. LexBlog is gathering and structuring the practitioner commentary no one else has so AI systems can find it, cite it, and use it. And get into the law libraries the likes of the those run and managed by the publishers of this white paper.