Spindle’s David Gold at LegalIT 5.0 on Crowdsourcing and the Law
April 8th, 2011 by Laura Bergus
The Young Bar Association of Montreal hosted the fifth LegalIT conference on Monday, April 4. This event brought together practitioners, scholars, and a variety of innovative legal professionals to discuss the current and future impact of information technologies on the law.
Spindle’s founder and CEO, David Gold, presented alongside LegalIT organizer and digital IP lawyer Marcel Naud on Crowdsourcing and the Law.
David spoke on the types of things in law that can be crowdsourced, current approaches to crowdsourcing the law, and challenges and consequences for legal practice.
His take-home message for the audience?
- That crowdsourcing the law is already underway in a variety of ways;
- That the issues and challenges of crowdsourcing the law differ from more widely known crowdsourcing projects, because, for now and for the foreseeable future, contributors to legal crowdsourcing projects are overwhelmingly professional lawyers and law students, not a rising wave of amateurs; and
- That, in most cases, the potential value of the lawyer’s legal knowledge far exceeds the cost to that lawyer of sharing it. In fact, the sharer may actually take pleasure in, and benefit from, sharing. So the bottleneck to sharing is basically just the costs of contribution and discovery. And the technologies of crowdsourcing are shrinking these costs. So you can expect that the issues will be worked out and that crowdsourcing will have an important effect on how we practice.
Slaw.ca covered Crowdsourcing and the Law. Blogger Patrick Cormier noted the point that effective legal crowdsourcing could ultimately mean fewer lawyers are needed to solve legal problems.
David attended several other sessions at LegalIT 5.0, as an audience member. He plans to bring some of the ideas and wisdom from a variety of presenters into his work at Spindle.
