It’s hard to believe I’m half-way through my year as a 2014 Writer in Residence for Ms. JD! It certainly goes fast, and it can be hectic at times, but I am grateful for the experience. For my June post, I reviewed Mootus and Casetext, and discussed how crowdsourcing seems to be making its way into legal practice…or at least, legal research.
A couple of posts back, I talked about Jurify, a new website where attorney-members contribute cases, legal forms, and other legal documents that they have found particularly helpful in their own practice. This type of pooled-resource contributions is commonly referred to as crowdsourcing, defined as “the practice of obtaining needed services, ideas, or content by soliciting contributions from a large group of people and especially from the online community rather than from traditional employees or suppliers.” (Merriam-Webster.com, “crowdsourcing,” obtained June 5, 2014) Traditionally, the legal industry is not known for its collaborative environment. Of course, this is a gross generalization, but after all, associates are competing against each other to make partner, and opposing parties want to keep their case strategy close to the vest; this profession, therefore, naturally lends itself to an individualist work ethic. Yet I believe that the legal industry is changing, starting to embrace collaboration as a tool for accuracy and efficiency in legal practice. This transition is evident through the recent emergence of legal resource platforms, like Jurify, that utilize crowdsourcing to build their collections. For this month’s post, I thought we would look at two more such sites: Mootus and Casetext.
You can read the full post here. Thanks for reading!
lawbrarianship 