Check Out My New Book
The National Labor Relations Book provides a novel labor law introduction.
I have written a book. It’s called The National Labor Relations Book and you can purchase it for $10 on my NLRB Research website (click here). Buyers receive PDF, EPUB, and HTML versions of the book sent to their email. An excerpt of the book is available for free (click here).
The National Labor Relations Book takes a novel approach to introducing labor law. Rather than attempt to create a comprehensive legal outline, I programmatically identified the 100 most-cited cases in this area of law, found the 100 most recent cases citing to each of those cases, and then used large language models (LLMs) created by Google and Anthropic to generate legal summaries using those 10,000 cases.
This particular method of legal summary was not feasible until the creation of LLMs because it would have been far too labor-intensive. Already, legal reference books like Developing Labor Law list dozens or even hundreds of contributors and those authors do not pore through nearly as many cases as I did. With this approach, I was able to produce this book by myself and charge ten dollars not hundreds of dollars.
The hope is that this book will be useful for people who are relatively new to labor law, including employment/labor lawyers, law students, union staff, and rank-and-file workers. Even experienced lawyers might find it useful as a reference book, especially because each case summary cites and links to the most recent decisions applying the summarized cases.
I think the book has value as a standalone resource, but also as an illustration of the kinds of things that can be done with LLMs for legal research. I used LLMs throughout the entire process, not just to produce the summaries. The LLMs wrote all of the code that went into calculating citation frequency, finding cases that cite to a target case, and then packaging all that together to send off for summarization. The LLMs even wrote the flask application that facilitates the purchasing and emailing of the book to buyers.
If you think the book might be useful or interesting to you, then obviously you should buy it. But even if you don’t think that, consider buying it as a way to support NLRB Edge, NLRB Research, and my work in this area, especially if you are not already a paying subscriber.