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Insight on digital media from the team at LexBlog, Inc.

We’re publishing our roadmap for the Library at LexBlog

Now / Next / Later / Recently Shipped — and why we decided to build it in the open.<br>
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For the first time, we’ve put the roadmap for the Library at LexBlog out in the open.

If you write for the Library, operate at a firm that publishes on it or partner with us on the data, you can now see where this is headed. Not because we finally got around to it, but because the people building on the Library deserve to know where it’s going.

The page lives on lexblog.com and tracks the current state of our internal roadmap. It’s organized into four lanes—Now, Next, Later and Recently Shipped—so at a glance you can see what we’re building, what’s coming and what already landed.

It refreshes every two weeks. We didn’t want a page that looked impressive at launch and went stale by month’s end, so what you’re looking at is the real picture, kept current.

A note on why we’re doing this at all. Most companies treat a roadmap as something to guard. We see it differently.

The Library only works if the people publishing in it trust where it’s going, and trust is hard to build from behind a curtain. Putting the roadmap in the open is our way of saying we’re confident enough in the direction to show our work.

Three things anchor the work.

The first is verified Author Records that establish an author’s identity and publishing history—a durable, credentialed record of what you’ve written and where.

The second is structured metadata that makes the Library useful to AI systems and legal research platforms, so the analysis our authors publish gets surfaced and cited rather than lost in the noise.

The third is a cleaner, more accurate data foundation underneath all of it, because none of the rest holds up at scale without it.

What ties these together is a simple idea: the work legal authors publish is secondary law, and it deserves to be treated that way—preserved, structured and findable for the long haul.

A blog post analyzing a new ruling, a firm alert breaking down a regulatory shift, a practitioner’s take on how a statute actually plays out. These are real contributions to legal knowledge.

For too long they’ve lived as disconnected pages scattered across the web, hard to find and easy to lose. The Library exists to change that, and the roadmap is how we get there.

This isn’t a list of someday promises.

Structured metadata is live on paid author profiles right now, and the first paid Author Records have already been sold. That’s the part we’re proudest of—not the plan, but the fact that real authors are already on the board.

The Recently Shipped lane is where you’ll watch this kind of progress land so you’re never guessing whether the roadmap is moving.

The near-term work is expanded taxonomy and classification to make the Library easier to navigate and cite, better onboarding so claiming an Author Record is simple, and the groundwork that lets our partners work with Library data directly.

If you’ve ever wished your published work was easier to find, organize or point a research platform at, this is the stretch of road aimed squarely at that.

We’re sharing the later-stage thinking too, even where the details aren’t locked. Some of it will shift as we learn, and a few items will probably look different by the time they ship. We’d rather show you an honest work in progress than a polished fiction.

Plainly, because we expect it to change—and we’d rather change it with you than at you.

We’ve been at this a long time, and the best calls we’ve made have come from listening to the lawyers, authors, publishers and research platforms actually using what we build.

So take a look at the roadmap. Tell us what matters most, what we’ve got in the wrong order or what we’re missing.

That feedback is what shapes what comes next, and we mean that. We’ll be watching what comes back, and you’ll see it reflected on the board.

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