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.

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.

Joel just updated the site with a new feature that allows you to follow the activity in an area of law in Spindle Law.  Just roll over the text of any branch in the tree (on the page for that branch) and click “follow.”  After confirming, you’ll be signed up to receive an email notification whenever anyone adds to, edits, comments on, vouches for, rejects, or nominates for deletion that branch, its authorities, its descendant branches, or their authorities.  Whenever you contribute yourself, you follow by default  (but can decline to follow by unchecking a check box, and can always unfollow), so you’ll be able to keep up on everything that’s happening in that section.