“Users of legal information can help create new kinds of arrangements with the information providers.” Evalyn Groove & P.J. Lucier, Banks-Baldwin Law Publishing Company in 1991.

Last year I was reading a post by Jordan Furlong titled “A message to my legal publishing colleagues,” and in it he referred to a 2006 post he wrote about the state of 21st Century legal publishing. In that earlier post, there were two things that caught my eye.

First, he quoted Seth Godin about the affect of blogs on old media:

Seth Godin is right: blogs are going to create thousands of expert media outlets with a total staff complement of one. It’s already started.” Seth’s actual comment added something a bit more interesting: “It’ll be a number of individuals representing themselves and building a following–with a filter to be named later. (Emphasis added.)

Second, Jordan made two observations about the new media and lawyers, the first of which was this:

What does this have to with you, the 21st-century lawyer? Two things. First, the day is soon coming when you won’t have to accept whatever the legal publishers decide you should know about. You can order tailored, in-depth legal news delivered to your desktop, be it through RSS feeds from the local courthouse, Yahoo! legal newsgroup postings, or a free e-newsletter from a sole practitioner outside Winnipeg who tracks the federal child support guidelines religiously.

In short, a proliferation of new media outlets (of 1, that is) will provide varied legal content from all reaches of the profession, undermining existing models.

Jordan’s original post mentioned traditional legal news media outlets and did not directly challenge legal publishing stalwarts like Thomson West or Lexis in terms of legal analysis coverage. I’m sure it’s safe to say he believes the new content providers will eventually make inroads into their business models as well.

Taking Jordan’s assessment into consideration, it occurred to me that lawyers need to also consider the problem of accuracy before rushing headlong into thinking that the new media concept of legal blogs will free us from the “antiquated” print publishing model. As one who actually writes and publishes law books with a large staff dedicated to ensuring the accuracy of that content, an article or post without some indicia of accuracy will mostly likely save you very little research time.

Towards accuracy

Kevin O’Keefe, who has made a career out of helping lawyers build presence, argues that the rapidly expanding community of niche blogs needs a strong business model to take on Thomson West and Lexis. In my opinion, to be successful, the model needs someone to start the taxonomy and create and manage the bibliography; a large organizing force bringing these new content providers together. A loose community of thousands of contributors doesn’t necessarily clarify an issue. It’s like a room of people sort of talking about the same subject, but just not to each other. It’s one of the great things about people on the tubes, but it makes for a terrible learning or education platform.

We have plenty of blog aggregators out there, like lexmonitor.com and blawg.com, and other folks who are trying to make specific blog searches easier, like feefiefoefirm.com, which uses a wrapper around a Google Custom Search to serve up law firm blog content. There are also great aggregators of free legal resources like LII and UCLA School of Law’s recent “Online Legal Research: Beyond LexisNexis and Westlaw.”  But ultimately, there is no singularly great system for organizing, searching, and retrieving all of this amazingly valuable content.

Spindlelaw.com, the experiment

When I stumbled on Spindlelaw.com, I thought we might be seeing the first attempt at creating some type of managed content system. It would appear that authorship is centered around “modules,” which comprise the entirety of the research system. There is a “chief editor” of the module who is responsible for creating its basic structure and overseeing its development. Something akin to a wiki I suppose. The online community is charged with the responsibility of adding and editing rules of law, and adding, editing, and verifying authority cited. Again, like a wiki, where 10% do for the 90%.

As best as I can tell, there are a few modules, one being a securities module, and another for evidence. The editor of the securities module has utilized his own blog content that he’s created to begin the foundations for the taxonomy. And the editor of the evidence module has this to say about the project:

“[The module is (1)] a mini-treatise on the law of evidence (mainly the U.S. federal law of evidence)[; (2)] a taxonomy of the law of evidence[; (3)] an outline of the law of evidence[; (4)] a budding intelligent data base about the law of evidence[; (5)] a platform for collaborative development—via the astonishing thing called the internet—of an intelligent (and free) storehouse of knowledge, analysis, and argument about the law of evidence. Of all of the above categories, the last probably best captures the spirit of the evidence module. (But in time—as the evidence module grows—the evidence module should become wider and deeper in certain respects than any existing treatise on the law of evidence.)”

Sounds ambitious. What’s interesting about this the system is that it (1) will rely on designated editors to help create and maintain an organizing structure for the information; (2) has a taxonomy and content that is malleable by the social, hopefully making it more refined and reactive to evolving law; and (3) will be a single platform for delivering the content making the user experience consistent.

Where to?

So, is this the direction we should be headed in? As a researcher it certainly appeals to me. It might actually spawn greater discussion and debate on the topics because it gives lawyers access to new media content in way that they haven’t up until now. It could also be that lawyers who blog and create amazingly helpful commentary may want to ultimately contribute to a venture like this by offering up their analytical content to the site (of course, with some kind of quid pro quo). The ability to quickly amass analytical content is key to the success of a project like this. The social’s attention span is not great.

In the end, I think the most important part about SpindleLaw is the idea of the site as a filter (as Seth Godin mentioned). It will help control where the content appears in a larger taxonomy without limiting it’s growth. And taxonomies are hugely important for helping us understand bodies of law. West Publishing built a billion dollar business around the idea.

Is SpindleLaw it? I don’t know, but I think we are headed in a good direction for capitalizing on the mountain of new media content out there.

[Image Beatnic]