A law blog post without an author’s name is not a blog post. It may be something else, but it’s not a blog post.
I regularly run across law firms with “blogs” where a good number of the posts, if not all the posts, use the firm’s name as the author.
They’re not blog posts. Their likely goal is to generate web traffic by putting content on the web. Content often written by a marketing company.
It’s as simple as looking at the role that law blogs play today. More legal insight and commentary is published on blogs than law reviews and law journals.
Just like law reviews and journals, blogs get cited by other blogs, journals and publishers. Blogs get cited by lawyers in briefs and memorandum and by the court in their decisions.
Citation includes the title of the post, the author, blog and the date.
It’s simply inappropriate and impossible to site a blog with law firm name as the author of an article.
No one is going to stop law firms with wannabe blogs and marketing companies from putting blogs on the web without an author.
But archives of secondary law, such as that of the Open Legal Blog Archive Project can not include such blogs.
The reason being that the blogs are being syndicated to other publishers of law, including legal research and AI platforms. These publishers are looking for legal insight and commentary, not marketing.
No question there will be challenges wadding through the morass of such content marketing, but being true to the law requires having authors on blog posts.
