The Open Legal Blog Archive is working on a live aggregation and curation of the legal blogs published by large law firms (the AmLaw 200).

Think of the site as a library.

Blogs, publishing firms, blog authors and blogs by subject areas will be presented in a live fashion.

Live in that the minute a blog post is published the library will be updated on the author profile page, the blog profile page, the publishing firm page and subject page(s).

The blogs will not be indexed on Google so as to protect a blog’s positioning on search.

Why this library?

The Archive is looking to serve large law publishers and the thousands of legal bloggers in this group.

LexBlog, which backs the Archive, is regularly asked by law firm marketing professionals and lawyers in large law firms what is being published on other blogs and who is publishing those blogs.

Historically, LexBlog published the State of the AmLaw 200 Blogosphere detailing blogs, subjects of the blogs, firms publishing the blogs and blog authors.

The last report took six months to prepare, I kid you not. By the time the report was “completed,” it was out of date.

Firms called to ask if we can add this new blog or to take a blog out of the report that was no longer being published. A lawyer left the firm, so can you remove them from the report was a common question.

The problem with a lot of the questions was that the report was not easy to update – pdf and in print.

The Archive, using LexBlog’s portal technology can bring the report, “live.”

New blog? Add it. New lawyer author? They and their profile will be added automatically when they post to a firm’s blogs.

One requirement for a firm’s blogs to be included in this library of the AmLaw 200 blogs is that the blog include an RSS feed.

RSS (Real Simple Syndication), which allows your blog readers to keep up with your latest articles and to be included in legal research and archive sites is included in virtually all blog technology, and is included in WordPress, out of the box.

Stay tuned, the Archive should have something up for you by the end of the year, or early next year.