[Update 3:17 p.m.: My post appears to have created some confusion. The blogs that make up the Blog Network are NOT shutting down. The Network was an affiliation of blogs that existed primarily to allow for advertising sales across the network and also for promotion and linking across the network. Primarily, it was an advertising network. So the ad network will be no more, but the blogs will carry on bravely without it.]

With so many changes afoot at Law.com, one question that has remained unanswered is the fate of the Law.com Blog Network. Now we have the answer: The network will shut down later this year.

Here is what Law.com editor Nathalie Gorman told me in an email:

When we first started the Law.com Blog Network, it was a great way for us to help legal blogs get off the ground and get the advertising dollars that they might not have been able to attract otherwise. As blogging has become more mainstream, there are now a lot more services and ad networks available to work with. This being the case, we will be winding down the Law.com Blog Network in its current form by end of Q3 2014. However, we value the relationships we have with the members of the Blog Network tremendously, and we will be reaching out to them individually to see how we can continue to work together. We hope that this will continue Law.com’s tradition of supporting and promoting the work of thought leaders and innovators in the legal space.

The shut down of the network will have no impact on any of the affiliated blogs, to the extent they are still operating. The network functioned primarily as a vehicle for selling advertising across a group of affiliated blogs. Many of the blogs were fully independent, such as mine.

Law.com launched the Blog Network in November 2004, in conjunction with the launch of Legal Blog Watch. The original roster of blogs it included were:

My blog became part of it two months after it launched. Over time, it expanded to include 29 blogs, some of which are still listed but no longer active.

The Law.com home page still has a section for displaying items from the Blog Network, but even that section is out of date. As you can see from the screencap to the right, two of the items listed show up blank because they link to out-of-date pages for blogs that have moved to new URLs.