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Introduction

What is OLPN?

Understand the Open Legal Publishing Network (OLPN), its core components, and how it empowers legal professionals through decentralized publishing and verifiable identity.

Overview

The Open Legal Publishing Network (OLPN) is an open protocol and ecosystem for the legal industry. It bridges two worlds: legal publishing and decentralized identity. At its core, OLPN enables legal professionals to establish self-sovereign identities and issue or receive verifiable credentials that link their contributions to trusted sources.

OLPN is not a single platform. It is a framework for:

  • Lawyers and Firms: to host their own identity hubs and publish content.
  • Credential Issuers: like bar associations, courts, and networks to provide machine-verifiable credentials.
  • Readers and the Public: to easily verify the source and trustworthiness of legal content.

Core Functions

OLPN provides three core functions:

  1. Identity Control: Every lawyer, firm, or association can run their own domain-based hub, creating a trusted source of truth for who they are and what they control. OLPN IDs connect people, organizations, and websites into a clear, verifiable network of relationships.
  2. Verifiable Publishing: Articles, blog posts, and legal updates are linked to verified identities and properties, so readers and machines know exactly where content comes from. The Clusters layer adds schema markup to make this content organized and machine-readable.
  3. Federated Discovery: Verified identities and structured content can be searched, followed, and indexed across the open web and Fediverse — without being locked into a single, centralized directory.
OLPN starts with WordPress plugins for easy adoption but is built to work with any website or CMS over time.

Components of OLPN

  1. Identity Hubs: Domains owned by legal professionals or organizations, containing credentials and linked publishing feeds.
  2. Resolver: A public service that verifies and resolves OLPN IDs to their domain-based documents.
  3. Credential Issuers: Trusted entities such as bar associations, law schools, or networks issuing credentials.
  4. Federated Search: Tools and directories that index OLPN credentials and content without central ownership.

How OLPN Works

  1. A lawyer sets up an identity hub on a domain they control.
  2. The hub is populated with credentials issued by trusted entities, like a Columns contributor badge or verified bar membership.
  3. Legal content published by that lawyer includes machine-verifiable links back to the hub.
  4. Readers, search engines, and other platforms verify both the author and content through the resolver.

Why OLPN is Unique

OLPN combines the credibility of traditional legal directories with the openness of the modern web:

  • Decentralized like the IndieWeb: No central gatekeeper.
  • Standards-driven like W3C DID/VC: Fully interoperable with global identity standards.
  • Practical like ActivityPub: Ready to integrate with existing publishing systems like Ghost and WordPress.

By creating an ecosystem of trust around legal publishing, OLPN strengthens both the legal profession and public understanding of law.