Spindle Law is a site for legal professionals. Our contributors include distinguished professors, law students, law librarians, and practicing attorneys. We’ve already made our case for how Spindle Law benefits law students. Here’s how contributing to Spindle Law helps the practitioners among us.

Benefits for Practicing Attorneys

1. Find context within the broader law

Browsing through rules and authorities in the expandable tree provides you with context for legal issues. Knowing under what authority to bring a cause of action, understanding the applicable standard of review, and getting down to the rules and exceptions that might apply to a particular fact pattern are challenging parts of legal research. The speed and ease of jumping through many areas of law, and of searching based on keywords, is much more intuitive than the traditional database-driven know-the-answer-before-you-begin methods. Even if your particular area of interest isn’t fully built out in Spindle Law, it’s an easy format in which to find analogies, like applying administrative law principles in our Clean Air Act section to non-EPA agency actions.

2. Record your research conclusions

Legal research is often cumbersome. We sometimes spend hours nailing down a single rule of law or succinct legal statement from an authoritative source. Usually, the fruits of that labor are tucked away into an internal memo a brief for a court. Do you have a good system for tracking individual legal rules you’ve uncovered, in case you want to use them again? Spindle Law does: SpinDoc. Registered users can save rules and their supporting authorities to their own SpinDocs with a single click. Once in the SpinDoc, rules are presented in a format that’s ready to be used in a legal memo or brief, including Blue Book formatted authority citations. Doesn’t that sound useful?

3. Express yourself as a professional

Not that lawyers are ever driven by their egos or reputations . . . But Spindle Law provides a no-nonsense platform for displaying your expertise in a broad or narrow area of law. Each Spindle Law member’s contribution statistics are publicly displayed on the site. Each rule or authority or topic you add is a chance to receive feedback from fellow practitioners. Your simple acts in vouching for, rejecting, or commenting on an authority (and of course your bigger contributions, too) are highlighted as recent activity on Spindle Law’s start page. Commenting, creating, and editing contributions are tracked and correlated to your name, drawing attention to your public profile and contribution statistics.