For years, legal research has been built around primary law—cases, statutes, code, regulations—and traditional secondary sources such as law reviews and journals.
All still important, but missing in the day of AI is the secondary law written by legal practioners, academics, law students and other legal professionals in blog posts, insights, whitepapers, and even, newsletters. It’s here that how the law is applied and works is explained.
When AI looks at primary law, only, the result is generic or wrong because AI is guessing at how to interpret primary law. There’s no insight from legal practioners and other legal professionals to help guide AI.
Not only does such secondary law fill in the blanks, it accelerates an understanding of primary law because lawyers doing the research and the interpretive work have the assistance and context AI gleans from practioner generated secondary law.
For too long lawyers and law firms have treated this kind of publishing as solely for marketing. That view is going to change.
In an AI-driven world, this work isn’t just about visibility. It’s part of the legal record. With AI, it helps shape how the law is understood, applied, and accessed.
