“My guess is that legal blogs will partially fill the ‘practicality’ gap between the legal academy and the rest of us. Blogs provide a unique opportunity for law teachers to directly influence the development of the law in near real time.” U.S. Dist. Judge Richard G. Kopf (April 2006 interview with Ian Best).
I have found over the last couple of years that our company’s process for creating and updating legal content (we write and publish practice manuals) has started to include a larger component of legal blog searching. The reasons for this are simple: (1) the traditional research model (primary + secondary) can sometimes yield less than satisfying results, and a good legal blog search might just capture the elusive analysis you were seeking; (2) more or less since 2003, the quantity (and quality) of legal scholarship on the web has grown exponentially; and (3) new services have made finding relevant material a bit easier. This got me to thinking about the problem of legal blog searching generally, and the related issue of whether lawyers have integrated it into their research practices.
The problem of legal blog searching
Since this post, I hadn’t bothered with checking on the number of different sites that offer legal blog search in a while. In a quick Google search, I found the following sites offering some form of legal blog specific searching: Justia, Blawg, ABA Journal, Law.com, Lexis Web, Blawg Republic, and LexMonitor. These sites, as well as some older ones, like MyHQ and Taxonomy of Legal Blogs, also offer legal blog directories. It’s terrific to see all of these sites offering some form of legal blog search. I tend to use Justia for straight legal blog searching and Law.com for the articles that are part of the ALM network. [Ed. note: some of the ALM content is behind a wall, so don't expect everything to be free.] Using these sites, however, highlights a fundamental problem with legal blog search generally. With the ALM content, you can narrow search results down by practice groups, states, type of content (e.g., news, commentary), etc. because they have a taxonomy and tag their content. But legal blog content is pretty flat, so narrowing results usually depends on the quality of your search terms and the author’s ability to write clearly and spell correctly (or just use spell check). Sure, for many of the legal blog search sites you can search within a “Practice Area” to help narrow results, but you’d be limited to the legal blogs included within it. And one thing I’ve learned from searching and using legal blogs in research is that good content and ideas can come from anyone. There is another alternative to using one of these sites to do legal blog research. If you know what blogs you like to read, trust, deliver good content, etc., you can always design a custom search list through Google. It’s easy to set up, and gives you the ability to find out if the authors you like to read have anything to say about your research topic. At the very least, you should consider setting one up for online law reviews to help cut down on search costs through Westlaw and Lexis. [Ed. note: feefiefoefirm.com I believe uses a Google Custom Search to search law firm websites for their legal content. You should check it out, it's pretty cool.] I recently set one up for law library blogs thanks to AALL.
It’s also interesting to note that although Lexis is getting into the “blawgosphere” with its Lexis Web service, I haven’t seen anything from Thomson West (either through TWEN, Westlaw, or Findlaw) or Wolters Kluwer (either through Aspen Publishers or Loislaw). In thinking about Westlaw, Lexis, or Loislaw, it’s hard to see how they would implement good blog searching in their closed systems without some type of agreement from the authors of those blogs. But knowing those folks, I wouldn’t be surprised at all to hear something is in the works. Oh, and if you have any experience using Lexis Web, I would love to hear about it.
So, do you search or what?
Despite the current limitations on legal blog search, if searching blogs and other online content is not part of your legal research model, it should be, at least for a couple of reasons. First, I believe strongly that there is value in this content for clients. In fact, we use posts, articles, etc. as citations in our publications, particularly because they often fill the “practicality” gap that Judge Kopf predicted. We all want to feel smart when we read a statute, a case, or a treatise, and there are a lot of folks out there that may have solved the problem you’re thinking about right now. Second, legal analysis of new cases, particularly in hot areas like e-discovery, almost always appears on the web before it winds its way into a journal article or secondary resource. If you’re waiting for a publisher to explain it to you, it may already be too late. For example, think about newspapers. By the time I see it in print, I already knew it. This is one of the reasons why I think a must-have for future legal research includes online secondary sources that include embedded dynamic annotations, that is, continually updated cross-references to current and relevant legal blog commentary.
There have been plenty of folks over the years who have commented on the perceived impact of legal blogs (and other online legal material) on scholarship and traditional legal publishers. A good example (and blast from the past) is Prof. Orin Kerr’s 2005 post (read the comments too) discussing the impact of blogs on the law review case comment. More recent comments have even suggested that legal publishers, much like the newspaper industry, are facing a sea change and should think about reinventing themselves. I have another upcoming post addressing distributed authorship and the problems I see with the current state of affairs, but let’s just say this for the time being: you, the consumer of all this information, will be the one telling us, the publishers, what needs to be changed and how. Unless of course you’ve haven’t actually made it a part of your research habits yet.
Oops, one more thing (sorry Mr. Jobs).
I would be remiss in not mentioning sites like JDSupra and PACER as valuable sources for legal research. If you’ve ever used a brief bank (Westlaw has an amazingly large, and expensive, collection), then you know how useful they can be for cutting down research time.
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