Where will all the legal blogs go over time?
It’s a real problem. Lawyers, and especially law firms, look at legal blogs for marketing. How can we draw more attention? It’s a short term outlook.
If a lawyer leaves a law firm, the firm is apt to delete their blog posts. Or remove the lawyer’s name from their posts and replace it with the firm’s name as author, making the blog posts useless as far as being cited and playing a role in advancing the law.
Courts are more apt to cite blogs than a law review or law journal. As the New York Times has written on a couple occasions, law reviews are becoming largely irrelevant. Citations will lead to broken links.
Legal blogs play a significant role in legal research. Lawyers looking for information on a subject turn to Google and find helpful blog posts.
Law is for the long term. Lawyers use law from years ago.
Law is advanced by dialogue and writing on the law.
You eliminate the long term and a useable dialogue and writing on the law, and you have a problem.
Legal blogs will need to be aggregated, archived and made useable for the administration and the advancement of the law.
Dismissing the problem is a little foolhardy.