The announcement of Typepad’s shutdown, set for September 30, 2025, raised concerns of losing extensive legal scholarship and commentary. LexBlog swiftly responded by launching a rescue initiative, successfully preserving 579,162 legal blog posts and migrating over 150 Typepad-hosted sites, which further expanded LexBlog‘s library to over one million preserved posts.
This move is seen as crucial in preserving a significant part of the legal profession’s intellectual heritage. LexBlog’s CEO, Kevin O’Keefe, emphasized the importance of maintaining these blogs as they form an essential part of secondary law, capturing valuable commentary and analysis.
An example of this effort is the preservation of approximately 224,000 posts from 51 blogs that were part of the Law Professor Blog Network (LPBN), with 16 of these blogs transitioning to the LexBlog platform.
- Law Professor Blog Network (LPBN): LexBlog secured exports for 51 blogs, totaling more than 224,000 posts, with 16 blogs already live on the platform.
- Attorney Blogs: They transferred 11 law blogs, amounting to 35,162 posts, from individual attorneys and law firms.
- Rescue Crawl: For over 100 non-LPBN blogs, where direct access was not possible, LexBlog utilized web scraping to preserve more than 320,000 posts.
LexBlog’s preservation work involved a rigorous three-phase plan of discovery, outreach, and migration, prioritzing LPBN sites and individual publishers. Where direct exports weren’t feasible, engineers conducted rescue crawls to capture content and backfill crucial images and PDFs.
According to Brian Biddle, LexBlog’s head of design and product, the response from the legal community has been positive, with many in academia and practice recognizing the critical nature of maintaining access to these insights.
However, not every blog will migrate to LexBlog; for instance, Paul L. Caron, dean of Pepperdine University’s Caruso School of Law and founder of LPBN, has yet to decide the future of his widely-followed TaxProf Blog.
Further plans include additional training sessions for editors and the possibility of creating an LPBN Publishing Network, integrated with a potential Law School Blog Network. This effort may evolve into a community of academia and scholars publishing together. For more details on this initiative, please visit the full article.