Case law has a citation system. Statutes have one. Law reviews have one.
But when a practicing lawyer shares insight and commentary on the law, whether it be interpreting primary law or breaking down the law for clients or the public there’s nothing.
No structured way for lawyers or the court to cite it. No persistent identifier connecting the work to the person who wrote it. No system that says, “This was written by a securities lawyer in New York with 20 years of experience and 200 published analyses on this exact topic.”
It’s all just content. Content marketing in many law firms’ eyes.
That was manageable when the only people reading practitioner commentary were other lawyers following a blog through RSS, links from Google or email. It’s not manageable anymore.
LexBlog has indexed over 1.7 million vetted articles, and growing. AI systems are ingesting legal content at a scale no one ever anticipated. Research platforms are expanding what counts as secondary authority to practitioner publishing.
When these systems encounter practitioner commentary, they have no metadata to work with. They often can’t verify who wrote it. They can’t assess whether the author actually knows what they’re talking about. They can’t cite back to a source a human can check.
The most knowledgeable lawyer on a topic becomes indistinguishable from someone who posted once.
That’s the gap the Author Record is built to close.
An Author Record is a verified, structured record that connects a lawyer to their published body of work in the LexBlog Library. Name, credentials, practice areas, jurisdiction, and every piece of commentary they’ve ever published. Indexed, classified, and linked to a persistent identifier.
Think of it as what the Library of Congress or Google Scholar does for authors.
Once that identifier exists, citation becomes possible by lawyers and the courts. HeinOnline, Clio/vLex, Bloomberg Law, Wolters Kluwer are built on structured data using AI solutions. Give them an identified author with a classified body of work, and practitioner commentary stops being loose web content delivered by RSS. It starts functioning as citable secondary law.
Give AI systems, whether LLM’s or AI solutions used by legal research platforms this metadata, and they can identify the authority they are looking for and the ability to attribute.
Twenty years of practitioner publishing has produced an extraordinary body of legal knowledge. Close to two million works in the LexBlog Library alone. It’s time that knowledge had the citation system it deserves.