Spindle Law Crowdsources Legal Research

Spindle Law is a new startup that aims to use crowdsourcing to make legal research easier for lawyers. In their own words, Spindle Law is a "community of lawyers reinventing the legal treatise." The site combines wiki-like features, social publishing, and granular taxonomy. By using a "spindle" tree, users drill down into different topics, or branches, to find specific terms and data. Once the specific concept is found, users can drill even deeper to find relevant case information that supports or challenges the position or statement. Social publishing comes into play because lawyers can rank, add comments, additional information or anything else that can prioritize what the crowd believes to be the strongest arguments. Symbols, which our brains can process faster than typography, make sorting types of information easier.

From my understanding, current options for finding cases and concepts require inefficient databases that are both expensive and keyword driven. The pain point here is that even with the most specific searches there is a ton of irrelevant data a lawyer must sort through. Spindle Law aims to reduce the amount of irrelevant information in searches, provide a faster searching mechanism, and make it easier to find supporting cases.

I suspect that the business model will work similar to Jigsaw - a crowdsourcing application for sales reps. Leads that are generated from websites usually don't have complete contact info - so Jigsaw aggregates this info such as phone numbers and email addresses from the crowd. Users are incentivized to add information to get free access. If they don't contribute, they can pay for access to the information. I assume users on Spindle Law will be incentivized or have to pay in the same way.

About the Author

Alex Lindahl

Editor, OpenEconomist

Alex Lindahl is the founder and editor of OpenEconomist. During the day he works in sales and runs software publishing at Acquia, an open source startup that is commercializing Drupal.