The main desire of Google is to serve up the most relevant, valuable content that they can. To that end, one of the many factors Google looks at when reviewing a site is the freshness, or how often new content is added. The ideal situation is to add content on a regular basis that gives Google the signal that the site is up to date and valuable. The regularly added content also attracts others to link to the material from their site. Inbound links are one of the major ways Google measures a sites authority. Links from other valuable, relevant sites increases your sites authority and typically increases its position in the search results. This authority metric is also known as “PageRank” (named after Larry Page, co-founder of Google).
Not as important as getting links to your site, is who your site links to, in this case most of these articles link to other law firms or business that might be related to the legal system. Some of the content I add that I supply often is not written as technical as some of the articles from other firms who supply the content to get the link back to their site.
A recent Google algorithm update focuses even more on the value of good, fresh, relevant content on a site. It was called the Panda update. The bottom line is the importance of fresh articles.