I read an article from the Mayo Clinic Insider, yesterday, that got me thinking about data from legal blogs and articles being used to help lawyers do a better job for their clients.
When Doctor David Jones, was a med student at Georgetown, his grandmother developed Alzheimer’s. She had anosognosia, meaning she didn’t know she had memory loss. Worse, she had cortical blindness—she couldn’t process what she saw—but thought she was fine. No one around her realized what was happening.
Now, as the director of Mayo Clinic’s Neurology Artificial Intelligence Program, Jones is using AI to analyze 16,000 brain scans and spot patterns doctors might miss. These patterns help diagnose Alzheimer’s earlier, before symptoms take over. As Dr. Jones says, “If physicians are aided by a technology that tells them about a pattern, they can provide better care.”
Here’s the connection to law: What if lawyers could do the same? The Open Legal Blog Archive holds 809,000 blog posts written by 50,000 lawyers—real, practicing attorneys sharing their insights and expertise on niche legal issues. It’ll hit a million blog posts this year.
Add the articles on major law firm websites, often written by lawyers who graduated from elite law schools and wrote for their law school review and we’d probably have close to two million articles.
Not to slight the authors on legal blogs, they too are elite lawyers with the same credentials, they and their firms just chose to publish in a more credible format and publication.
No matter, this is a goldmine of legal knowledge. It’s basically a living large language model (LLM) for the law, built by professionals who know what they’re talking about.
A lawyer facing a question doesn’t need to rely on memory, an outdated treatise, a long-shot Google search or a discussion with another lawyer or two. Instead, they can tap into this massive collection for information and brainstorming.
The content is current and practical. It’s the legal equivalent of pattern recognition in medicine: spotting trends, addressing challenges, and delivering answers as needed.
Just like AI strengthens doctors, legal content authored by practicing lawyers—and tools that organize and analyze them—can make lawyers better.
Dr. Jones and his team are using AI to make medicine more precise and patient-centered. The same can be done in law with legal blog posts and articles to make the law more client-centric.