Founder · publish.law
Building open publishing infrastructure that helps legal professionals reach the people who need them. From branded firm publications and topic sponsorships on The Legal Examiner, to independent Ghost-based sites through publish.law, to the portable credentialing layer at OLPN — connecting the platforms that make lawyers easier to find and trust.
Nick Carroll has spent three decades building the infrastructure that helps lawyers reach the people who need them. He leads The Legal Examiner, one of the longest-running legal publishing platforms in the U.S., where law firms build authority and connect with their communities through branded publications and topic sponsorships.
His work now spans three connected brands. The Legal Examiner is where firms publish and distribute to a national audience. publish.law, which he founded, gives individual attorneys and boutique firms their own independent site, newsletter, and open web presence on a domain they own. And the Open Legal Publishing Network (OLPN), which he also founded, is the open identity and credentialing layer that ties them together — giving legal professionals a portable, verifiable presence that travels across platforms.
Across all three, the goal is the same: make legal information more accessible, and make the professionals behind it easier to find, verify, and trust — whether the people looking are potential clients, referral sources, or the AI systems that increasingly shape how lawyers get discovered.
Topic Guides on The Legal Examiner
Platforms & Products
A Firm Publication is a branded content hub on a Legal Examiner subdomain — like neworleans.legalexaminer.com — where law firms publish articles, commentary, and news under their own masthead. Every post automatically cross-posts to the main Legal Examiner with the canonical URL staying at the firm’s subdomain. Firm publications are included in The Legal Examiner’s Google News index and distribution channels, including email newsletters and the open web via ActivityPub.
Topic Sponsorships pair a law firm with a specific practice area on The Legal Examiner — like sexual abuse or Stevens-Johnson Syndrome. The sponsoring firm collaborates on pillar content, provides expert review, and gains dedicated visibility through lead-generation forms, author profiles, and contextual placement throughout the topic cluster. It’s a way to build topical authority while connecting with people actively researching that legal issue.
publish.law is for individual attorneys and small firms who want their own independent publishing presence — not on a Legal Examiner subdomain, but on their own domain. It’s Ghost-based hosting with built-in newsletters, analytics, and open web distribution through ActivityPub. Think of it as the solo practitioner and boutique firm counterpart to a Legal Examiner Firm Publication.
The Open Legal Publishing Network (OLPN) is an open identity and credentialing layer for legal professionals. It gives attorneys a verifiable digital identity that connects their publishing activity, professional credentials, and institutional affiliations across platforms — whether they publish on The Legal Examiner, publish.law, or any participating site. OLPN is currently in development at olpn.org.
Whether you’re a firm looking for distribution or a solo practitioner ready to publish, there’s a place for you on the network.
Become a Contributor
Nick Carroll
The hardest part of investing time in generative engine optimization is that the payoff doesn't show up cleanly in your analytics. This piece walks through how to measure progress even when direct attribution is messy, useful if you're trying to decide whether your writing and publishing work is actually moving the needle.
Nick Carroll
Before you pay for a tool that tracks whether you're showing up in AI answers, read this. New research found that AI visibility scores swing so much between checks that most of the movement is just noise, not real signal. The implication: build your presence, but don't obsess over the weekly numbers.
Nick Carroll
Your traffic numbers can look perfectly normal while AI search quietly stops pulling from your site altogether. The piece covers how AI systems gradually favor a shrinking pool of sources, and if your name and writing aren't already in that pool, good stats won't save you. Worth reading before you assume things are fine.
Nick Carroll
This explains the actual mechanism AI search uses to decide what to cite. If you want your name showing up in AI-generated answers, understanding RAG is the starting point. Short version: AI doesn't crawl everything, it retrieves from an index it trusts. Getting into that index, under your name, is the whole game.
Nick Carroll
Six specific shifts: what used to move the needle in SEO that doesn't anymore, and what to do instead when AI systems are doing the answering. If you've been publishing more to get found, some of what you're doing is still right and some of it is the old playbook. This helps you tell the difference.
Nick Carroll
Google is developing a linked-graph knowledge format that helps AI agents traverse and understand your site, so how your firm's information is structured is starting to matter in ways that go beyond standard SEO.
Nick Carroll
AI search systems think in entities, not keywords. That means how well your name, your credentials, and your practice areas are connected across the web matters more than any single page you've published. Publish.law is designed to do exactly this, and this piece explains the underlying reason why consistent, cross-platform identity building actually moves the needle in AI-driven search.
Nick Carroll
Costigan's thesis: own the asset, don't rent it. A firm's knowledge should be a graph it owns, not fuel for a vendor's model. Right, and it applies to the half he skips: your public record. An attorney's published analysis is an external knowledge graph, what AI reads to decide who's authoritative. Most attorneys rent that too. Own the internal graph for the work. Own the external one for discovery.
Nick Carroll
AI-driven search is sending real traffic and real inquiries, but most firms have no idea how much because they're not tracking it separately. This piece walks through what measurement actually looks like. If you're investing in content to get found in AI answers, you need a way to know if it's working.
Nick Carroll
If you've been treating SEO and 'AI optimization' as two separate projects, stop. Google has collapsed them into one system, so content that ranks well in search is the same content AI agents pull from. One solid strategy covers both, which means you don't need to reinvent anything, just make sure what you're publishing is genuinely useful to the people searching for your practice area.
Nick Carroll
Google is now applying spam enforcement to what gets surfaced in AI Overviews, not just traditional search results. If your firm's content cuts corners on quality or looks like it was written to game rankings, it's not just your blue links at risk. Getting cited in AI answers requires the same clean, authoritative content you'd want a judge to read.
Nick Carroll
As AI reshapes how people find attorneys, your social presence is starting to function as a trust signal, not just a marketing channel. This piece lays out practical ways to stay visible across platforms when traditional search results aren't the whole story anymore.
Nick Carroll
“One way they do that is by telling clients when they don’t have the right solution for them and helping them find another lawyer who does. Or telling the client why he doesn’t need a certain type of service he’s asked about, and know that you will contact them if and when that changes.”
Nick Carroll
Moz lays out a simple framework for structuring your content so AI agents can find it, understand it, and cite it. If you want your practice-area expertise showing up in AI answers, this is the kind of structural thinking that gets you there. It's practical, not theoretical.
Nick Carroll
If AI defines your firm from its homepage, ask the harder question: what is it using to define you?
LawLytics calls the homepage an "entity anchor," the snapshot a machine uses to know who you are and what you do. But you're not your firm. Your individual anchor is probably LinkedIn or your firm bio. You don't own either, and both are limited for the job.
If machines decide who gets put forward, you need an anchor of your own.
