Kevin O’Keefe, the trial lawyer turned legal blogging evangelist who runs LexBlog, the company that provides the technical support – but not any of the copy – for this blog and for the many other blogs listed on the lower left hand corner of this page, has been running a series of posts on the question of the impact of legal blogs on law reviews. I have my own thoughts, based on years of practice and my own stint on a review’s editorial board, on the question of what the growth of legal blogging means for the future of these august but hide bound publications. Now I try to stay away from blogging about blogging – in fact I think I have managed to blog for many months now without ever discussing the subject in a post – because I think it’s essentially navel gazing and it has nothing to do with the reason why people come to this blog, which – I hope not naively – I assume to be to learn about ERISA, intellectual property litigation and the law of insurance coverage. But I couldn’t let the subject raised by Kevin (who, by the way, has no compulsion against blogging about the topic of blogging because, well, that is what his blog is about – blogging) pass without commenting on it from the standpoint of a practicing litigator who focuses on the areas discussed in this blog.

When I came across Kevin’s posts on this topic, the old song lyric that video killed the radio star immediately started sounding in my ears, and no, I wasn’t listening to my ipod at the time. Law blogging is in the early stages of making detailed legal analysis on specific subject areas available to the entire legal community in ways that are both searchable and far more practical and useful than anything that law reviews generally provide. There is little doubt in my mind that practicing lawyers can find far more useful information about specific issues in insurance coverage, for instance, from David Rossmiller’s blog, or on the law of ERISA from Roy Harmon’s blog, or on intellectual property issues from Patently O, and so on and on, then they will ever locate in the published law reviews.

And why is this? There are multiple reasons. First, at the risk of being too negative, law reviews have, over the years, essentially become echo chambers for law faculty to talk to one another or, worse yet, have simply become a place for law professors to publish esoteric work that is absent significance to practicing lawyers or the courts simply because they feel they need to do so if they are to pursue tenure. This is hardly a novel criticism, as I can remember a federal judge – I forget who it was, but he was out of the industrial mid-west – pointing out years ago that published legal scholarship had no merit or relevance to what he did every day. Law blogs are obviously different; the point is to publish useful legal information at a level of legal sophistication sufficient to be relevant to the practicing community, the courts and clients. That is an entirely different audience than the one that law reviews are targeted at, and an entirely different type of information that is intended to be transmitted.

In fact, when I was in law school, a particular near octogenarian law professor, rumored to have been during his earlier days at Harvard the model for Professor Kingsfield in the book and movie The Paper Chase, spoke once about how, many years ago, the writing of treatises that were of practical use to the profession was considered a worthy output for a law professor, but how that was no longer the case. Instead, esoteric topics, the more so the better, were what advanced a career in legal scholarship.

Second, blogs are searchable in a matter of moments. Run a search for ERISA, for instance, over at Google Blog Search, and see how quickly you can find information about the differing approaches to the standard of review in ERISA cases when the administrator is operating under a conflict of interest, a favorite topic of this blog. Then compare that to how quickly you can actually find law review articles on this subject, with the exception of those pieces commented on and linked to in blog posts. I know that those articles are out there, because I have read many of them, but you won’t find them quickly, or without doing traditional types of legal research to locate them.

Third, law reviews have divorced themselves from the practicing lawyer, in multiple ways, only one of which I will comment on here, so as to avoid turning this blog post into, well, the length of a law review article. They make publication too time consuming for many successful lawyers to consider pursuing, thereby limiting the pool of potential author/experts – perhaps intentionally? – to law faculty. I have on my own hard drive, for instance, a nearly finished law review article covering the law of trade dress infringement in the First Circuit that grew out of a summary judgment memorandum in a trade dress infringement case I was litigating. The substance is all there, but finding the time to fix the cites, and dress up some of the transitions, and dot each I and cross each T? Almost impossible, unless I am going to assign it to an associate, which somehow strikes me as cheating. But what I may well do is finish it up to a nearly finished draft status, and put it up on this blog, and just plain bypass the time consuming law review publication system, while still putting the information easily in the hands of those who may have use for it. Blogs make all of this type of information far more readily available to the community than law reviews do or, frankly ever will, unless and until they not only add accompanying blogs but also make all of their text freely available for on-line searching.

So yes, whether you practice in ERISA, insurance coverage, intellectual property, or any of an endless variety of other practice areas, legal blogs are far and away the best source of information, and they are turning law reviews into dinosaurs. The whole subject reminds me of some discussions in Seth Godin’s book small is the new big that can essentially be summed up as, in the age of the internet, businesses can either change or die. As far as I am concerned, that is where law reviews find themselves right now: they can either figure out how to transform themselves into an easily accessible on-line repository of valued information, or they can continue to be marginalized, only at ever increasing speed, into a place where law professors simply go to impress one another.