Legal publishing versus marketing, and content marketing in particular.
There just seems to be a difference between the two.
Some folks will say that publishing is part of legal marketing and business development.
I guess it could be, but I never looked at legal treatises, law journals or law reviews authored by lawyers as a form of content marketing. Even though such authorship worked to establish a reputation as an authority.
These legal treatises and law reviews found themselves into law libraries to be archived for research and citations. Marketing not so much.
Legal publishing before the net was captured by “legal publishers.” Everything was in books.
There were large legal publishers and smaller legal publishers, the later mostly gobbled up by the large ones. No matter who the publishers were, this secondary law was captured in books and delivered to legal libraries.
The Internet democratized and opened legal publishing.
Secondary law, whether coming from academics, practicing lawyers, or other legal professionals was published on blogs and websites.
The problem, today, is that a lot of this secondary law is running wild. This law is not being captured and delivered to libraries.
Some secondary digital publishing will get captured at places like SSRN and law school law reviews.
But there is going to be more publishing running wild than being captured by these places. Places that do not necessarily stand for the democratizion of legal publishing, either.
I don’t have all the answers, but I am thinking more and more that LexBlog is at the heart of the law.
We’ll want to leave our mark in helping deliver the future of legal publishing.
Rather than define digital legal publishing or legal blogging as part of content marketing, maybe take a look at how these two advance the law, democratize who advances the law and make the law more accessible.
Everyday, we have lawyers and law firms contact us who want to publish on niches in the law.
Whether it’s a blog, microsite or publishing to their website, we’re going to help them publish the law with our platform.
Until the Open Legal Blog Archive, backed by LexBlog, this law and so much other digital legal publishing was escaping. There was no library of this law or place to go looking for it.
Now, so long as a credible digital legal publication has an RSS feed – and most do – digital publishing from blogs and sites is being captured by the Archive.
In addition to the Archive being a law library including a small segment of the law, the Archive needs to do much more, including making such law availble to legal research platforms.
Legal research and AI platforms – the Fastcase’s and Casetext’s of the world – are today’s legal libraries. The Archive needs to deliver needed “books.”
Beyond delivering a full service platform to blog, LexBlog needs to look at how we help archive, deliver and advance the law.
Things are evolving.