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?

1. That crowdsourcing the law is already underway in a variety of ways;
2. 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
3. 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.

“Spindle Law should serve as inspiration for forward thinking firms that want to add value.”  So says Ron Friedmann in “A New Generation of Online Legal Services?“, his latest post at Prism Legal.  Not only does Friedmann envision Spindle Law as a valuable legal research tool but also as system for law firms to marshal their know-how in practice areas in which they specialize to support their own lawyers and benefit their clients.

“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.