How many law students know that Spindle Law is great for tracking authorities for a research assignment or for outlining blackletter law for class? Too few! We’re reaching out to law schools directly to let more students know how Spindle Law can help with everyday legal research and writing tasks.

Here’s an example. Let’s pretend the law student says: “I need to know how much deference the court should give the EPA when it decides something is a regulatable air pollutant.”

Normally, legal research for the novice goes like this:

1. Law student poses a research question. Here, something like, “What’s the standard of review for this federal agency when it’s interpreting its own rules?”
2. Law student gets lost for hours in the bowels of LexisNexis or Westlaw, struggling with counter-intuitive methodology that requires knowing half of the answer to said research question before even beginning a search. “Should I search for all kinds of law on standards of review? Only cases where the EPA is a party? Statutes relating to pollutants?”
3. Law student prints out reams of paper with cases, statutes, and secondary sources that might in some way relate to the research topic. Here, sources might include cases challenging various EPA actions, environmental law practice materials, the Administrative Procedure Act, or law review articles opining on the policies underlying Chevron deference.
4. Law student slogs through printouts for more fruitless hours seeking legal rules, beginning to formulate the answer.
5. Law student transcribes legal rules into word processing document, struggling to create flawless Blue Book cites. “Do I cite to the case that cites the statute? Do I cite to the Act section number or the US Code? I want to include this legislative history because I spent four hours tracking it down, but who the hell knows how to cite to legislative history?!”

Here’s how legal research goes with Spindle Law:

1. Law student browses through the expandable tree. “Environmental law. Hm, yep.”
2. Law student expands the tree down through the Clean Air Act > Regulation of Air Pollution > Regulated Air Pollutants. There’ s a clickable, copyable, ready-to-use-in-Blue-Book-format citation to the Clean Air Act definition of pollutants.
3. Law student realizes that’s not helpful for the standard of review, clicks once to travel back up the expanded tree.
4. Law student sees “Judicial Review,” clicks once to expand to see “Standard of Review” and clicks through.
5. Law student peruses several statutory and case law rules on the standard of review of EPA actions, copying these to the computer clipboard and her SpinDoc. “Yes, yes, yes – Blue Book formatted!!”

And if the student is looking for law that isn’t yet to be found in the tree (we admit, few areas are as nicely presented as the Clean Air Act here), she can contribute rules supported by authorities she finds using more traditional research methods. Law students who contribute law they find in the course of regular research assignments will gain:

• Experience in concisely stating legal rules.
• A place to save research, in the intuitive SpinDoc.
• Their name associated with an innovative research tool. (We encourage students to contribute in a practice area where they’d like to work. It’s great to build knowledge and to show off one’s expertise and writing abilities to potential employers.)

If you are a legal researcher, research or writing instructor, or law student, I’d welcome the chance to show you around the site and talk about how Spindle Law is already useful for legal research and writing tasks, and how you can make it even better by helping contribute to our easy-to-use online legal treatise.

Back in June, Robert Richards (@richards1000), one of the world’s great conduits of information about legal information, retweeted this one from @lbergus:

I want a legal wiki where ppl post statements they want to find support for and the citations are crowdsourced.

I replied (in 2 parts), figuring Laura might like what we were doing over here at Spindle Law—and she did.  She reviewed us for Lawyerist, I chatted with her on her Legal Geekery podcast, and in other conversations and emails she offered all kinds of great ideas for our project.

Now, and for the next several weeks, Laura has agreed to blend her voice with ours.  She is tweeting from @spindlelaw, posting at our Facebook page, and setting us up on LinkedIn.  She’ll be blogging here from time to time here, and helping law school professors, librarians, and legal research and writing instructors use Spindle Law with their students.

Laura is a social media and technology specialist as well as a 3L at the University of Iowa College of Law.  She’s thoughtful on many subjects, so read her posts here and all the other places I just mentioned.  Welcome, Laura!