FixRunner, a company offering WordPress solutions, is launching a “Free AI WordPress Builder,” tool designed to change how websites are created and hosted. The platform eliminates the requirement of paying for hosting before seeing a live website.
Now, anyone can build a professional, AI-powered WordPress site, preview it for 48 hours, and decide where to host it — with FixRunner or a provider of their choice.”
I’m not familiar with the AI component in the FixRunner launch nor the quality of the solution or the company altogether, but the concept itself is interesting. Giving customers the ability to begin publishing without charging them to start.
When it comes to the law, that concept is even more compelling.
You’d like to think that people in the law who want to offer their insight, commentary, and information helpful to the public should be able to own their publishing space, not contribute only on social media platforms such as LinkedIn, Substack, Facebook, and other mediums where they can’t archive their work or ensure it remains available for the long haul.
This idea is something LexBlog has been kicking around.
How do we open up the ability to publish right from the start? That could include law students, who we already support for free through the Law Student Blog Network, but it could also extend to anyone interested in the law – legal academics, practicing lawyers, or others involved in the profession or business of law.
For LexBlog, the concept would work like this:
- Step One: Offer a free platform to get up and running immediately, hosted on a LexBlog subdomain.
- Step Two: For those who want to build their own “seperate presence,” move to their own domain — their own blog or legal publication under their name, which they own and control forever.
- Step Three: Build out a complete profile — a page that archives all of a publisher’s writing, searchable online, and even recognized as a source in AI. This profile would include the “publisher’s” name, background, and social media presence, offering a complete record and archive of their legal publishing.
The challenge for lawyers and legal professionals looking to publish will always be education and support. What does it mean to publish in the law? What does it mean to publish in an engaging way that builds trust with an audience, rather than simply pushing out “content” or penning “legalese”? What does it mean to cite authority–not just legal sources, but to reference and engage with other writers online, in order to grow your own confidence and credibility as a publisher?
Still, the concept of offering a free platform, where LexBlog provides the education and support where someone can contribute to the law is an intriguing one. At LexBlog, all publishing would feed directly into our library and network, making each publisher part of a larger community of contributors.
The goal, ultimately, is to bring more people into legal publishing in a real and authentic way, not just a world of content marketing to game Google and AI. If we can get more law students, academics, and practitioners sharing insight, we can grow the law, make it more open, and democratize publishing–and the law itself–for everyone.
Until now, legal publishing has often been confined to closed environments–law reviews, paid legal publications, SSRN, and the like. We need to make it more open. A free platform to begin publishing could be one way forward.