Plays Well with Others: How Collaboration and Crowdsourcing are Changing Legal Research
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A presentation by Robert J. Ambrogi to the annual meeting of the American Association of Law Libraries, July 20, 2015.
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Plays Well with Others: How Collaboration and Crowdsourcing are Changing Legal Research
- 1. Plays Well with Others: How Collaboration and Crowdsourcing are Changing Legal Research Robert Ambrogi, Esq. www.lawsitesblog.com @bobambrogi ambrogi@gmail.com
- 2. … or not.
- 13. “I didn’t know anything about lawyers when we started. Turns out, they don’t like technology, and they don’t like to share things.” -Apoorva Mehta
- 15. • LegallyMinded (ABA) • MyPractice (MSBA) • Lawyer-Link • HubSTREET • PivotalDiscovery • ESQChat.com • Esqspot
- 16. Others are in states of suspended animation
- 17. This page was last modified on 30 November, 2007.
- 18. Last edited 8 years, 4 months ago
- 20. “Our early experiments asked: 1. Would lawyers post research questions to the crowd? 2. Would the crowd post answers in the form of legal citations? 3. Would other lawyers find the public Q&A thread useful/helpful? We found yes to the first, no to the second, yes to the third. On the second, we found "no" even for unemployed new lawyers sitting on the couch – pretty clear refutation of our hypothesis that we would find early contributors among the community of underemployed lawyers. My takeaway from those results was that explicit, unpaid crowdsourcing, Q&A-style, isn't a viable model right now. I'd love to see someone prove that wrong.” Adam Ziegler Co-founder
- 22. “There’s so much information lawyers have (particularly in our own little fields of expertise) and we have so much to say about what’s happening, though we usually keep those thoughts to ourselves, either writing emails to listservs or blogging in our small interconnected blogospheres. I thought, wouldn’t it be great if those conversations happened publicly, around the text of actual opinions and statutes themselves? And before you know it, I came here to kickstart Law Genius.” Christine Clark Executive Editor
- 29. “How do we keep it up-to- date? That is the billion- dollar question, isn't it. Nearly all of our contributions are from staff writers -- close to 99%.” Geoff Pallay Editor in Chief
- 35. Three That Could Be Contenders
- 41. “When we started out, we focused on annotations. The truth is, attorneys don’t write that way. The right people weren’t incentivized to write.” “We created communities to give people real incentives to write on Casetext.” “Now what we're trying to do is make it easier. You don't need a blog or Wordpress. You don't need to worry about SEO – we have 350,000 users every month. From day one, you can speak to a built in audience. “ “The big-picture goal is to match the incentives and interests of people who are excited to write about the law … with what we think will be a really powerful research experience. … We want to make these discussions into data, to overlay the social layer with the primary source documents. “ Jake Heller Casetext CEO
- 43. “Last spring, we began what we knew would be an ambitious effort to change fundamentally the nature of Wex into something that was more crowdsourced. The advantages we perceived … included the ability to incorporate input from a large number of subject matter experts (both attorneys and otherwise) and a possible strategy for curating content that otherwise grows "stale" rather quickly. … “While the goal is ultimately true Wikipedia- style crowdsourcing, we're several steps away from that.” Craig Newton LII Associate Director
- 45. Next Steps: Author Profile Module “It remains my belief (founded more on instinct than data) that author attribution is a key piece. Not only is attribution a big incentive for folks to write for Wex, it is a good tool for the reader in order to evaluate the ‘trustworthiness’ of what's in the article. Badges and Karma Points “This is something that seems to work for other websites catering to other types of expert communities, and we'll see if our contributor pool can be motivated in this way. ” Craig Newton LII Associate Director
- 47. “We are at the beginning of a virtuous circle of growth: increased integration with our primary law site means greater awareness of the commentary site, including greater awareness of who is contributing; when lawyers and law profs see work from their peers on the platform, they are motivated to join and contribute their own work; expanding content from an expanding roster of respected professionals drives greater usage which make the platform more complete and more attractive to existing and future contributors to keep the flow of content going; continual growth will prompt us to pursue deeper integration of commentary and primary law which, hopefully, keeps the circle moving.“ Colin Lachance CanLII CEO
- 48. 1.Make it easy to contribute. 2.Make it rewarding to contribute. 3.Make the content useful to others. 4.Success will breed success. Can lawyers learn to play well with others?
Hinweis der Redaktion
- Checkered History Why? Lack of participation.
- 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 employees or suppliers.
- Editorial enhancements = value add
- Color commentary
- Harvard (then Stanford) law professor Lawrence Lessig first published Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace in 1999. After five years in print, Code needed an update. So Lessig posted it to a wiki and let people edited it by adding either ideas, or questions, or new material. In January, 2006, Lessig took the product of that wiki-edit, and added his own edits to produce Code v.2.
- 2010: “A new kind of legal research and writing system.” Would make legal research “faster and smarter.” -structure information more intuitively – tree structure. -build on the knowledge of its users Crowdsourcing part: Like with a wiki, all registered users could add or edit authorities, edit the tree, comment on authorities, and vouch for or reject authorities.
- 2012: “first mass collaboration platform for lawyers and clients.” Focus was on using crowdsourcing to enhance access to legal research. “Think of it as a Wikipedia for the law,” VentureBeat reported at the time. “By crowdsourcing the curation and information-gathering process, the startup plans to slash subscription fees for legal research.” Disappeared not long afterwards. Re-emerged in January 2014 in a very scaled back version. This time, it aimed not to create legal research material, but to curate it in an intuitive way using tags. It stuck with the crowdsourcing idea, only on a more limited scale, hoping its users would help add content to the site such as blog psots, journal articles, law firm alerts, legal forms, etc.
- This was founded in 2011 by an attorney who was a VP and legal counsel at Brown Brothers Harriman His idea was to use crowdsourcing to come up with better legal forms. Anyone could post a form and anyone else could revise or comment on it. The idea was to use crowdsourcing to achieve a consensus of what should and should not be in legal agreements.
- Launched 2011 From my blog: “Lawford’s developers have the ambitious goal of building the largest legal networking platform in the world. In fact, they say that they hope someday to have every lawyer in the world become a contributing part of the site.” Planned to add in court opinions and legal articles. “The idea is that you will be able to integrate actual cases into discussions about them.” Also wanted to facilitate sharing of legal documents and articles. It was founded by a former Amazon.com software engineer, Apoorva Mehta.
- Share tips, documents, forms, briefs, etc.
- A wiki for law librarians. Created in 2006. Last updated in 2007.
- Last update of any kind I could find was six years ago. All edits were by the same person. The updates appeared to stop when the site’s creator moved to a new job.
- another site that uses crowdsourcing for legal research, but with a different approach. It describes itself not as a legal research site, but as a platform for “open online legal argument” designed for both law students and practicing lawyers. The idea is simple enough. A user posts a legal issue to be “argued.” Other users respond by posting cases they believe are relevant to the issue, together with their arguments for why a case applies. Still other users can then comment on a posted case and vote on whether a case is “On Point” or “Off Base.” For example, one issue asked, “Do mobile phone users have a reasonable expectation of privacy in the geolocation data transmitted by their phones?” Eleven cases have been posted in response, with the most highly rated being In re Application, 849 F.Supp.2d 526 (D.Md. 2011), which the poster described this way: “Rejecting search warrant application and holding that an individual has a reasonable expectation of privacy in his/her location and movements and thus in geolocation data.”
- My takeaway from those results was that explicit, unpaid crowdsourcing, Q&A-style, isn't a viable model right now. I'd love to see someone prove that wrong.
- Legal analysis for the crowd, by the crowd. Then there’s Law Genius, part of the larger Genius network of crowdsourced community sites, all of which grew out of the original site, Rap Genius, which was started in 2009 for the purpose of listing and annotating rap lyrics. Soon, users started using the site to annotate all sorts of other stuff, from the collected works of Shakespeare to the roster of the 1986 New York Mets to the warnings on the back of a Tylenol bottle. Last July, the site officially relaunched as Genius, becoming a hub for a range of communities devoted to topics such as rock, literature, history, sports, screen and tech. All are united by the site’s overarching goal, “to annotate the world.” Genius breaks down text with line-by-line annotations, added and edited by anyone in the world. It’s your interactive guide to human culture. Last November, law became the latest addition. It is an effort to crowdsource statutes, case law and other legal news. Any registered user can add text and annotate any text. Other users can vote up or down on annotations, or add their own suggestions to the annotations. As you view text, any portion that is highlighted has an annotation. Click on the highlighted text to view the annotation. To add your own annotation, just highlight a selection of text.
- A wiki providing tax law and research info. Anyone can edit and add articles. “Based on user feedback we are not shutting down the TaxAlmanac.org website however the site is now an archived version as of June 2014. While all of the existing discussion threads and commentary will be preserved you will no longer be able to edit content, post to forums or create additional logins.”
- 2005
- Last updated 2013
- Ballotpedia is an online encyclopedia about American politics and elections. Our goal is to connect people to politics by providing accurate and objective information about politics at the local, state, and federal level. Lucy Burns Institute Ballotpedia is published on a wiki platform, meaning any registered user is welcome to add knowledge and improve our content. Every submission to Ballotpedia is fact-checked and curated by our professional editing staff. All Ballotpedia content must be neutral, accurate and verifiable. Ballotpedia currently has 814,449 articles and 10,802 registered users.
- An encyclopedia of world law. Welcome on JurisPedia, an encyclopædic project of academic initiative devoted to worldwide law, legal and political sciences. You are invited to create an account and to contribute, by adding a new article or by modifying this one. There are currently 1,678 articles in permanent construction... An initiative of the African Legal Information Institute, the Faculty of law of the Can Tho University, the Faculty of law of the Groningen University, the Institute for Law and Informatics (Saarland University), the Institut de Recherche et d'Etudes en Droit de l'Information et de la Communication (Paul Cézanne University), and the team of JURIS (Université du Québec À Montreal). The project is open for cooperation with other partners. Any other teams of researchers or Faculties of Law in the whole world can freely join us. Participation in JurisPedia requires only human implication on the shared law.
- Last updated 2012
- Over 200 open-access law reviews Over 150,000 articles largest open-access law review portal on the web. It provides access to more than 200 law reviews containing more than 150,000 articles. The oldest law reviews in its collection date back to 1852.
- Launched in 2013 as a legal research site that would use crowdsourcing to annotate cases. Users would be able to add tags to cases to help organize them, add links to secondary sources that discuss the case, add annotations to the case, and reply to and comment on other users’ annocations. On June 17, casetext launched Legalpad Casetext folks compare it to LinkedIn’spublishing platform or to the Medium publishing platform, but for people who write about the law online. LegalPad is an application within Casetext where users can draft articles. The articles get published to Casetext’s communities and immediately shared with all the users who are members of those communities. The articles also become part of the Casetext database of legal commentary. If an article discusses a case, the article links directly to the case and the case links back to the article. In a sense, it is an alternative to blogging. It is a place to publish legal analysis and commentary and have what you publish both be shared directly with others who are interested in the topic and be connected to the actual legal materials you discuss, so that when others read that case, they will also see your commentary connected to that case. “It is a new way to read and write about the law,” says Casetext founder Jake Heller. Last October, Casetext introduced new community pages — pages organized around practice areas and interests where lawyers could contribute analysis, meet others in their fields, and engage in discussions about current legal developments.
- October 2014: Casetext communities Designed to provide common ground for lawyers who share interests and practice areas, these pages allow lawyers to contribute analysis, meet others in their fields, and engage in discussions about current legal developments.
- Launched in 2013 as a legal research site that would use crowdsourcing to annotate cases. Users would be able to add tags to cases to help organize them, add links to secondary sources that discuss the case, add annotations to the case, and reply to and comment on other users’ annocations. On June 17, casetext launched Legalpad Casetext folks compare it to LinkedIn’spublishing platform or to the Medium publishing platform, but for people who write about the law online. LegalPad is an application within Casetext where users can draft articles. The articles get published to Casetext’s communities and immediately shared with all the users who are members of those communities. The articles also become part of the Casetext database of legal commentary. If an article discusses a case, the article links directly to the case and the case links back to the article. In a sense, it is an alternative to blogging. It is a place to publish legal analysis and commentary and have what you publish both be shared directly with others who are interested in the topic and be connected to the actual legal materials you discuss, so that when others read that case, they will also see your commentary connected to that case. “It is a new way to read and write about the law,” says Casetext founder Jake Heller. Last October, Casetext introduced new community pages — pages organized around practice areas and interests where lawyers could contribute analysis, meet others in their fields, and engage in discussions about current legal developments.
- LegalPad is an application within Casetext where users can draft articles. The articles get published to Casetext’s communities and immediately shared with all the users who are members of those communities. The articles also become part of the Casetext database of legal commentary. If an article discusses a case, the article links directly to the case and the case links back to the article. Start typing, “Brown v. Boa” and it suggests the full case name. Accept its suggestion and it drops in the full name, in correct Bluebook citation form and hyperlinked to the full text of the case. If you want, you can then load the full case in a panel alongside the editing tool. Select text in the case and, with a click, insert it as a quote in your article. Another cool feature: If you want to add an image to a post, you can search for images on the web from directly within the editor. When you find one you like, simply click it to insert it. Adding PDFs is just as easy. Drag the file to the editor and it will embed the full PDF document within your post. Also in the style of Medium.com, all posts will use the same fonts and formatting — a fairly basic but professional-looking format. Choosing styles such as bold or italics involves just highlighting text and a style bubble appears with those options.
- WEX is a collaboratively-edited legal dictionary and encyclopedia launched in 2005 We are interested in contributors with: demonstrated expertise in particular areas of law a desire to educate law novices the ability to communicate effectively with an extremely diverse audience. Now embarking on a “limited crowdsourcing” experiemnt
- Craig Newton, LII Associate Director After much internal analysis and planning, our first concrete step was to build a user-friendly authorship platform within our Drupal-based content management system. We had no desire to deal with stacks of submissions arriving in MS Word (or, as we joke, Wordperfect). Having tested the functionality and ease of use of the platform with a group of law students, we were ready to find some volunteer content contributors in what we labelled a "limited crowdsourcing" experiment. About a year ago, then, we did a little soliciting among our donors and other friends and ultimately compiled around 100 folks who expressed interest in writing anywhere from 1 to several articles in Wex each. We issued each volunteer sufficient credentials to create content in the CMS and spent what turned out to be probably too much effort identifying what everyone wanted to write about to ensure there would be no overlap. We also developed and circulated a short "How To" guide addressing both the mechanics of the authoring interface and a what amounts to a short style guide. For example, "hyperlinks are better than footnotes; but, if you must use a footnote, here's how to make one in the authoring platform." While the goal is ultimately true Wikipedia-style crowdsourcing, we're several steps away from that. First, we've incorporated a degree of credential-checking in the sign-up process, and that's unlikely to go away soon. On one hand, that inhibits the sort of real-time "hey, that's not quite right but I can fix it" edits that we'd love to encourage. On the other, that prevents Bob Ambrogi's new Wex article on legal tech from being edited by the 15 year-old kid who lives down the street. While we remain in "limited crowdsourcing" mode for the foreseeable future, our next step is to incorporate a newly-built author profile module into the CMS. That module will allow (1) our volunteer authors to create author profiles and (2) users of the website (ie readers of Wex articles) to see the credentials of any credited Wex author. It remains my belief (founded more on instinct than data) that author attribution is a key piece. Not only is attribution a big incentive for folks to write for Wex, it is a good tool for the reader in order to evaluate the "trustworthiness" of what's in the article. I'm also hoping that authors who know their name is on something on our site will be motivated to keep the article current as the law changes (see earlier reference to "a strategy for curating content"). At a minimum, attribution containing "originally created on" and/or "last edited on" information will also help the user make an informed decision about the currency of any given article. The author profile module will also contain within it the potential to manage what we're calling "karma points" as well as a "badge" system where we can run various sorts of "beach clean up" campaigns from time to time and hand out little digital merit badges to those who show up to help. This is something that seems to work for other websites catering to other types of expert communities, and we'll see if our contributor pool can be motivated in this way. As for "karma points," those can be used to manipulate everything from how much biographic/contact information contributors can show in their profiles to how often a contributor's name get preferred placement in our lawyer directory. Once we deploy the author profile module, we'll be ready to engage in another round of author recruitment. I'll be less subtle than Tom was below: we'd love your help in spreading the word when the time comes.
- A project of the Canaidan Legal Information Institute In April 2014, CanLII launched CanLII Connects as a way to marry the caselaw it houses with commentary from the legal community. To do this, it encourages lawyers, scholars and others who are competent in legal analysis to contribute commentary on cases or to post summaries of cases. Only registered members are allowed to post and only after they have been approved by CanLII Connects staff. Once membership is granted, any member has the ability to add content, comment on the content of other members, and upvote content. The site also allows entities to register as a “publisher” and post content. A publisher can be any law firm, organization, group, business or school that is also a member of the legal community. Publishers can post content to CanLII Connects directly and also authorize affiliated individuals (such as members of a firm) to post under the publisher’s name. A publisher can manage all content published under its name and by its affiliated members. The site also aims to draw content from blogs and other publications. It does not scrape content directly from other sites, but it encourages authors to republish their content on CanLII Connects. In this way, the author can link his or her content directly to the ruling it discusses and make it discoverable by someone who is researching that ruling.
- Virtuous circle of growth
- Can lawyers learn to play well with others? Eternal optimist Rewarding: Recognition, upvoting, badges Making it useful by connecting it to primary law and