What impact are digital legal citations making on online reputations?

The digital revolution has reached many aspects of our lives, including the professional. In terms of digital legal citations, their emergence online has had a substantial impact that has changed the way that legal experts can influence others and enhance their reputations. How has this area transformed our research process, and what changes can we expect to see in the future?

The chance to reach a wider audience

One of the first examples of a legal book of citations was Modus Legendi Abbreviaturas in Utroque Iure. Created in 15th-century Germany, it brought together many examples from Roman law and elsewhere. This was followed by other texts such as the Harvard Bluebook, which has given guidance on legal citation for several decades and is now in its 21st edition.

These books helped shape the way that we think about legal citations and carry them out, but reliance on printed materials meant that they only reached a limited audience, mainly law students and professionals working in the industry. With the arrival of digital citations, it has become a lot easier to find relevant information, which has helped the most influential and respected legal voices reach even more people.

The Bluebook can be accessed fully online, with a mobile-optimized version that includes a free trial before an annual subscription is needed on a personal or team basis. If we look at the impact on a specific person’s digital reach, we can see that Samuel L Bray of Notre Dame Law School has a long list of cited titles. The highest is Multiple Chancellors: Reforming the National Injunction from 2017, which has been cited over 500 times. In second place, The system of equitable remedies from 2016 has now been cited on more than 250 occasions.

Help others find the right information

The result of so much legal information and opinion being easily available online is easy to see. For a start, it has become a lot easier for students and law professionals to find the information they need. They can now easily back up their investigations and reports with citations that the reader can instantly verify as being relevant and correct.

This summary by Oxbridge Essays of how to write a law essay points out the importance of evidence and analysis to build towards a solid conclusion. It’s easy to imagine researchers in the past having to look through a pile of law books and papers to find the information they needed to reach the conclusion they were looking for.

These days, it’s a lot easier to search online and find the right information. Citations play a big role in doing this correctly, as following the established process for citing legal experts allows anyone who reviews the essay to quickly confirm the details.

This doesn’t mean that studying law has suddenly become simple. It’s generally listed alongside the likes of medicine and engineering as the most difficult degree to complete, but the presence of digital citations has at least lightened the research burden. The reputation of the person being cited benefits when a lot of students find the same citation useful in their studies. With more than116,000 students studying for a Juris Doctor degree in the US in 2023, there are plenty of opportunities for reputational growth.

Spark online discussions

This easy way of finding legal citations has allowed more people to speedily find out more about legal matters. It only takes a moment to get hold of a piece of evidence that can be backed up with the name of the author and the publication where it first appeared, further boosting the author’s reputation.

In this way, healthy online debates and discussions can now be carried out more effectively. Rather than people making their points without any proof, digital citations are a big part of the move towards informed and reasoned debating that lowers the risk of misinformation being accepted as fact. Law forums and discussion threads should be the immediate beneficiaries of this trend, as there is now no longer any reason for anyone to present their points without digital citations as evidence.

The future of digital legal citations

The process for finding and quoting legal citations should continue to prove vital in the future as our lives become even more digital. Innovations including virtual reality, augmented reality and the blockchain are among the emerging technologies that are disrupting many industries, and they should make it even easier to look for citations in the future. Artificial intelligence is already being used to help researchers track down relevant quotes instantly and without any hassle.

The idea of finding an expert’s comment on the matter and quoting them to prove a case has long been the backbone of legal research. This will continue to be the case long into the future. However, the use of new digital technology should ensure that it becomes easier to carry out with less risk of any relevant information being missed or incorrectly cited.