I was a VP of Business Development at Martindale-Hubbell of LexisNexis when my previous company was acquired by them. I respected the heck out of Carol Cooper, its EVP and Publisher who was continuing to build a directory of profiles, one begun around the Civil War.
Profiles were a big deal in generating work for lawyers and firms and they (me included when I practiced) paid a lot of money for the directory listings. Working on profiles continued with the publishing of legal blogs where lawyers and law firms looked for profiles with a business development bent.
Today, working on the LexBlog Library of practioner publishing, profiles are something totally different. One, because of what a profile is for outstanding law libraries, for legal research platforms and for AI.
These profiles drive authority and credibility. The best way to say it may be that a legal directory profile sells services and a library profile preserves and validates the published work of practitioners and other legal professionals for research, citation, and long-term use.
A lawyer profile for business development/lawyer directories could include:
- Name, title, firm, contact information
- Practice areas and services
- Experience and representative matters
- Education and bar admissions
- Awards, rankings, testimonials
- Media mentions and speaking
- Calls to action
- SEO-optimized language
A lawyer profile for a law library such as the Library of Congress or Google Scholar represents the legal practitioner and legal professional as a publisher.
Such a library profile would be prone to include:
- Author name
- Affiliation and role
- Practice domains
- Canonical list of writings
- Titles, dates, sources, URLs
- Time span of publishing
- Minimal and factual description of the author and what they write about
And AI is looking for brief meta data and bodies of work. Whether it by a major LLM or legal research companies using AI to process and interpret primary law and secondary law such as publishing by legal practioners and other legal professionals.
As LexBlog is moving on its library part of the business, what’s diffent is assuming a role in legacy legal publishing, advancing the law and making the law more accesible.
In which case the profiles we’ll present in the library will be focused on credibility and authority, the later groupings , which versus selling legal services.