Will lawyers really reveal what they know about the law if they can’t send somebody a bill for it—possibly for every tenth of an hour of it? It’s a fair question that reasonably occurs to some people when they hear about Spindle Law. When you look more closely, though, you realize that, in a project full of experiments, this is one place where we aren’t breaking new ground.

Lawyers have a long and varied tradition of sharing analysis of the law in public ways for reasons other than a paycheck. A fairly new instance is the proliferation of law blogs we write for—our own blogs, other people’s blogs, blogs run by law firms, by private companies, by non-profits, you name it. Older examples include writing for print bar publications, teaching and making presentations for legal associations, and many others.

Why do lawyers give away their expert knowledge? Because they get more out of it that way, professionally and personally, than they would by reserving every insight for paying customers. Demonstrating expertise helps lawyers generate business through referrals and makes them more attractive to potential employers, for example. Many also find it intellectually satisfying or enjoy the interaction with those learning from them.

At Spindle Law we’re hard at work to create an environment that rewards contributors richly in many ways. It’s a brand new kind of environment, but if we get it right, lawyers will contribute for all the same old reasons they always have.

“Spindle Law is unlike any research method you learned in school. To me, it is a backwards (read: totally intuitive) way of drilling into legal rules and finding the authorities to support them.”

Please go read the whole of Laura Bergus‘s wonderful review on Lawyerist this morning. Then, please return to Spindle Law, sign in, and share a bit of what you know about the law. As the review says, you “can use Spindle Law as an outlining tool for any legal topic, as well as a way to track and store research for memo- and brief-writing projects. All while contributing to the site to make it more useful for others.”

If you think you might like to contribute to the site but aren’t sure how to get started, please email us.  As I mentioned in my podcast conversation with Laura on Legal Geekery, we’re excited to be just getting started on a section on civil procedure.  If that’s something you know something about, whether you’re an experienced litigator or a thoughtful law student, please mention that specifically.  If you have another area in mind, please mention that.  If you don’t have a specific area in mind, that’s great, too.

Two terrific pieces about Spindle Law appeared on the web today.

Robert Ambrogi has an excellent post about the site on his LawSites blog.  He does a great job describing Spindle Law, and explaining why lawyers should find it an intuitive way to find answers to legal questions.  In fact, if you haven’t figured out what in the world it is we’re doing over here, and you’re curious, I refer you to the LawSites piece.  For those of you who don’t follow this sort of thing, Ambrogi is one of the leading commentators on legal technology in the country, so we’re really pleased about his post.

Also today, Legal Geekery‘s newest podcast (Episode 15) includes a 15-minute-or-so conversation that Laura Bergus recorded with me a couple of weeks ago about Spindle Law.  (Listen to the whole thing, but if you want to start with the Spindle Law segment, it begins at 37:25.)  Laura, as you may know, is both a law student and a professional social media expert, and, as she related on her own blog on the 30th, we ended up speaking after she tweeted her desire for a site that crowd-sourced propositions of law and supporting authorities.  So it almost goes without saying that our project makes sense to her.  It was a real pleasure speaking with her both during the interview and beforehand, when she let me pick her brain about the best ways to get law students involved in what we’re making.  I hope you’ll find it interesting, and if you’re one of her law student listeners—or a lawyer or law professor or other law type—please join us!