The work we’ve been doing at LexBlog on our aggregation and curation software, precipitated by the volume of content published on the pandemic, has me wondering about “aggregated publishing” by law firms and lawyers versus the constant focus on getting eyeballs to to their publications directly.
Leading legal professionals have a ton of niche expertise and publish a ton of insight and commentary to build strong reputations. The same with doctors, scientists and other other professionals.
I am not as familiar with science and medicine as the law, but I do see aggregated publishing there. Rather than every medical school or hospital publishing a separate publication for each niche, the leading medical professionals publish to publications with articles from medical professionals from around the country or the world.
Legal professionals need not give up their independent publications/blogs, especially in the case of passionate and authoritative lawyers whose blogs, and themselves, personally, have established brands.
Just take the legal professional’s publications and get the content aggregated and curated. Curated in the fashion that the Coronavirus Legal Daily curates content from thousands of lawyers. The result is a data base and news publication of relevant content from hundreds or thousands of legal professionals from all the law firms – large, small, law professors, general counsel etc.
For legal professionals who don’t have their own publication, give them the ability to publish directly to the relevant publication of aggregated and curated content.
All of the contributors and organizations will be profiled in the aggregated publication – and for those whose content is being first published on their own publication don’t index the content for Google.
I am thinking of it kind of like the Associated Press model. You have reporters all over the world, but their stories are not published in the “Associated Press” magazine or news paper, their stories are published world over as relevant for hundreds of newspapers .
Curate relevant content from the aggregator for niche publications – Cannabis Legal Daily, Illinois Lawyer Now (Illinois lawyers content for Illinois consumers and businesses).
Legal professionals get the panache of publishing to niche publications (could be in more than one curated publication) without having to go through old school publisher gatekeepers who keep the contributed content, which they did not pay for, behind subscription paywalls. Or paying companies to distribute their content, something many law firms chasing web stats do, after their lawyers have spent hundreds or thousand of dollars in time, writing a piece.
Traditional publishers are struggling, at best, with adopting their models to the net. In addition, at the speed at which technology advances, what worked on the Internet for digital publishers fifteen or twenty years may not be the best solution today.
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