Gideon Burton's List: Crowdsourcing

• The crowdsourced approach to online caselaw rating allows the entire legal community to weigh in on whether a given decision is important, and why. Given the choice between the expert and the crowd, I’d like to hear from the crowd.

   

  It’s the natural next step towards an overall collaborative approach to legal research. Thanks to JD Supra, we can already see what a collaborative precedent and document database looks like. What will come next? Collective annotation of key statutes through a wiki? A multiplicity of online law reviews like The Court? More law school case summary services like Twistlaw? The discussion about the future of legal research won’t center around the commercial providers much longer. It will center around which free, collaborative sites create the best ways for lawyers and legal professionals to collectively improve everyone’s ability to find the legal information they need.

• Its goal is to make legal research "faster and smarter." It seeks to do this in two ways: by structuring information more intuitively and by building on the knowledge of the lawyers who use it.
• Spindle Law (http://spindlelaw.com) describes itself as "a new kind of legal research and writing system."
• Much like a wiki, all registered users can add or edit authorities, edit the tree, comment on authorities, and vouch for or reject authorities.
• Spindle Law positions itself as a starting point for quickly finding relevant authorities, thereby reducing time spent in paid legal research sites
• Judgepedia (http://judgepedia.org) wants to tap into its users' knowledge to build a comprehensive encyclopedic reference about America's courts and judges. You might say that Judgepedia is the Wikipedia of the judiciary.
• Judgepedia is sponsored by the Lucy Burns Institute, devoted to promoting openness in government and to helping citizens compile and share information about governments.
• a new site, OpenRegs.com (http://openregs.com). They have created this site "to make the proposed and final regulations published in the Federal Register easy to find and discuss, so that citizens can become better informed and more involved."
• OpenRegs.com has its own iPhone app

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