I recently wrote a post on the concept of legal blogs as learning modules, and in it I make clear that I like the idea of independent editors helping to organize the editorial content of legal blogs into a larger taxonomy. The current legal content web needs a system (better than a simple Google Custom Search) that enables lawyers to pool what other lawyers and legal professionals have written on a given subject in an effort to gain a greater understanding of an area of law. Think Thomson West’s Key Number System, but for blogs. The post mentions a new start-up called Spindlelaw.com, but I’ve recently read about another start-up with a different take on the same idea: myCorporateResource.com (mCR).
I’m not going to review the site because Greg Lambert over at 3 Geeks already did a great one, and Robert Ambrogi added some new takes with his yesterday. Suffice it to say, mCR aggregates client alerts from AmLaw 100 firms and then reviews, sorts, and summarizes them for you. Hit up the links for the reviews to see the myriad of ways they present this information to you.
As a publisher, I’m less interested about the subject-matter of mCR and more interested in the reasons behind doing it. I’m going to pull a quote from Robert Ambrogi’s post that he attributes to mCR’s founder (Nick Montgomery) because it highlights what I see going on around the legal content web:
The problem is that on a stand-alone basis, individual law firms simply do not produce a sufficiently comprehensive range of this material and what they do produce is often not timely from a client’s perspective. However, when one pools the efforts of 100 firms, the result can dramatically change this perspective. All of a sudden, the client has a memo on a given piece of legislation the day it is introduced/adopted or an alert on the relevance of an appellate court ruling the day that it delivered. (Emphasis added.)
Mr. Montgomery’s statement clarifies something I wrote in my earlier post: “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.” But when you bring them the all together and organize them, your perspective can change. And systems like these can help reduce time to understanding (“TTU”) in a lot of practice areas. For example, I was recently commenting to someone that I would like a site that does something similar to mCR: aggregates, organizes, and summarizes the best posts on recently issued U.S. Supreme Court cases.
I do believe mCR represents one direction we are headed with legal blog content, and honestly, it would not surprise me to wake up tomorrow morning and read that Thomson West has been working over the last year to categorize all legal blog posts and alerts under the Key Number System, and offer a WordPress or Blogger widget so you can add your posts to the system. It’s not the full-blown editorial enhancement we might eventually want, but it’s a big step towards getting a handle on the beast. But until that day comes, I suspect we will be seeing more folks like Nick Montgomery pop up in different legal sectors.
I also want to point out that Greg Lambert emphatically noted that mCR’s service is FREE. (Seriously, he uses exclamation points.) And if you’ve been following the Malcolm Gladwell and Chris Anderson debate (here and here) over Anderson’s newest book “Free,” you might see a glimmer of Anderson’s argument here; namely, I can offer this for free because other people are writing the content for free, whether for reputation, expression, etc. But in the end, there is an expense to editorial enhancements, which do not approach zero by the way. I assume Mr. Montgomery will eventually find a way to monetize his service. It’s then when you’ll have decide whether it’s worth the asking price. Sorry Greg.
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