Legal writing is one of the most perishable records we have. A firm rewires its website, a practice group folds, a blog platform sunsets and years of commentary on the law simply vanish—no redirect, no archive, no trace.
The analysis lawyers publish in the moment a decision lands is often the only contemporaneous record of how the profession understood it. When it disappears, that memory goes with it.
The Library at LexBlog exists to keep that from happening. It is a single, open, continuously preserved collection of what attorneys and firms publish about the law—gathered as it is written, kept in one place and left open for anyone to read and anyone to join.
This report is a portrait of that collection as it stands today, drawn from the Library’s own data. It is also an invitation, which we will come back to at the end.
The collection in numbers
The Library now holds more than a million published works—1,017,731 of them—written by 61,045 authors.
Those works come from 2,935 distinct publications, the individual blogs and titles where legal commentary actually lives, run by 1,722 publishers, the firms and organizations behind them.
Underneath that sits a deep layer of structure. Every work is tagged for what it is about. The Library now tracks 36 practice areas, 99,000+ cases, 6,000+ courts, 150,000+ topics, 49,000+ statutes, 20,000+ agencies, 94,000+ companies and 500+ places.
That tagging is what makes the collection more than an archive. It is what lets us ask, across the whole profession at once, what lawyers are paying attention to.
Who publishes
No single firm sees the whole field. The Library does, because it collects across all of it.
Some publishers operate at remarkable scale. The largest is the Law Professor Blogs Network, an academic constellation whose titles together account for more than 200,000 works.
Behind it come firms whose commitment to publishing is a strategy in itself—Marler Clark, Norton Rose Fulbright, Squire Patton Boggs, Fox Rothschild and Reed Smith among them.
How we count
We rank by the number of distinct publications writing about something—not by the raw number of works. The difference matters enormously.
A few blogs publish at enormous volume on a narrow beat. Count works and they swamp everything, and the “most-covered” list becomes a list of whoever writes most often. One prolific food-safety blog would make food safety look like the defining preoccupation of American law—we see you, Bill Marler.
So we don’t count volume. For the rankings that follow, except where noted we count how many different publications wrote about a case, a statute, a company or a place.
That measures breadth of professional attention—how widely something registered across the bar—rather than how loud any single voice was. When hundreds of independent publications converge on the same subject, that is a signal worth trusting.
Practice areas
At the highest level, the Library sorts into practice areas—the broad domains lawyers organize their work around.
Employment and labor leads by a wide margin, followed by business and commercial work, health care, then banking and finance.
Two entries—food and drug, plus immigration—rank higher here than their breadth alone would suggest, a reminder that a few dedicated publishers can lift a whole area by sheer volume. Technology and AI has climbed into the top tier, which the rest of this report will bear out.
Cases
The Library tracks 99,050 distinct cases. The ones that draw the widest coverage are the decisions that reset settled expectations and change industries.
Trump v. United States and Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization lead the field, each covered by well over a hundred distinct publications.
Behind them runs a line of decisions that changed how lawyers advise clients day to day—Bostock on workplace discrimination, Loper Bright on agency deference, Roe and Obergefell, plus a cluster of arbitration and standing cases that quietly rewired litigation strategy.
Read year by year, the pattern is even clearer. A single case tends to define each year, and it is almost always the one the Supreme Court had just handed down.
Courts
The Library also tracks which courts the profession is watching, and one towers over all the rest.
The U.S. Supreme Court draws more than double the coverage of any other court—no surprise, given how many of the cases above are its own.
Behind it come the federal courts of appeals, led by the Ninth, Fifth and Second Circuits. The one outlier is the Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York, which ranks third on the strength of the enormous corporate bankruptcies that pass through it.
Windsor gives way to Obergefell, then to Epic Systems, then Bostock, then the twin earthquakes of Dobbs in 2022 and Loper Bright in 2024. It is a decade of the Court’s biggest moments, one per year.
Topics
Topics are the profession’s own vocabulary for what it is preoccupied with. Here the year-by-year view tells the real story.
Then COVID-19 takes over in 2020—covered by nearly a thousand distinct publications, an event that touched every practice area at once and dwarfed every ordinary year’s leader.
After the pandemic recedes it is non-compete agreements, then diversity, equity and inclusion as the political winds shift. Watch the runners-up and a quieter arc surfaces underneath: generative AI, climbing hard from 2023 on.
Statutes
The Library tracks 49,068 distinct statutes and rules. The leaderboard is a portrait of where the law actually bites.
The Americans with Disabilities Act leads, trailed by the CARES Act and the GDPR—the last a reminder that American firms now write about European law as routine business.
Employment and benefits statutes crowd the list, alongside the healthcare and privacy regimes that reshaped whole industries.
By year, the statutes trace the decade’s legislative and regulatory fights directly.
The Affordable Care Act owns its implementation years, the Fair Labor Standards Act the overtime battles that followed and the GDPR its 2018 arrival. The CARES Act explodes across the profession in 2020, and the Corporate Transparency Act surfaces as the new compliance worry of 2024.
Agencies
The Library tracks 20,672 agencies. Coverage concentrates sharply at the top.
The Department of Justice draws the widest coverage by far, followed by the Federal Trade Commission, the Internal Revenue Service and the Securities and Exchange Commission.
The DOJ is so consistently present that a year-by-year view would simply name it almost every year—it is less a story than a constant. The European Commission’s place near the top echoes the statutes: for American practitioners, the regulatory conversation no longer stops at the border.
Companies
The Library tracks 94,278 companies—as parties, acquirers, targets of enforcement or makers of the products at issue.
The technology giants dominate. Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft and Apple all draw hundreds of distinct publications.
As with agencies, no single year has a real race at the top—Google simply leads year after year. The more revealing movement is at the frontier.
For most of the past decade OpenAI was a whisper in legal commentary, a handful of publications a year. Then, in 2023, it truly arrived—covered by nearly a hundred distinct publications almost overnight.
Anthropic appears in that same moment and climbs steadily behind it. The arrival of the AI era is visible in the Library as the exact year lawyers suddenly had to start writing about these companies at all.
Places
Legal commentary has a geography. 550 distinct places carry enough coverage to map, each shown as a single dot.
New York City is the most-written-about place by a wide margin, followed by Chicago, Los Angeles and—tellingly—Delaware, whose standing reflects its role as the country’s corporate-law capital rather than its size.
The international centers register clearly too. London, Toronto, Hong Kong, Singapore and Paris all draw real coverage, tracing the routes along which legal work flows.
The invitation
A million works is a beginning, not an end. Every figure in this report exists only because a publisher chose to keep their work somewhere it could be found.
The Library is open, it is free and it is built to outlast the platforms that legal writing currently lives and dies on.
If your firm publishes commentary on the law, it belongs here—preserved, searchable and part of the record. Join the Library.