Someone recently asked me how many years of blog content you should keep live on your law firm website.
Your law firm website is not the right place for blog content, an independent blog site is, but if the website is where your blogs live, the answer is forever.
You do not delete blog content from your website. If a lawyer who penned a blog post leaves the firm make sure the content or the blog in entirety moves with them or remains in your archives live to the net.
Legal insight and commentary published on legal blogs plays a part in secondary law.
Secondary law, consisting of law journals, law reviews and blogs are of sources that explain, criticize, discuss, or help locate primary law – that being cases, codes and regulations.
Secondary law is routinely relied in by lawyers, judges, clerks and legal academia.
Take a blog post down and a link to it whether on another blog, a legal brief or a court decision becomes broken. The law is “gone.”
This insight – secondary law – is called upon for years as legal professionals do research.
The content needs to have a place to “exist” for it to be indexed by Google and aggregated by legal research and AI platforms.
To eliminate the content altogether would be akin to going in the law library and saying we need to get all the old books and journals off the shelves.
I understand the need not to “run” older content on profile, practice group and news pages on the law firm website, but you cannot just get rid of old blog content.
As lawyers, we have the ethical obligation to maintain the integrity of the legal profession and cultivate knowledge of the law, not only for legal professionals but for access to legal information for society as a whole.
Tossing out the legal insight you created flies in the face of common sense and our obligations as legal professionals.
No matter that the “content” was created for marketing of the law firm. In fact, tossing out the content then, may make even less sense.