Why We’re Crowdsourcing the Law

After the Supreme Court’s landmark ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges this past summer, I received a call from a journalist from South Dakota. Despite the Court’s historic ruling that same-sex couples had a constitutional right to marry, the state constitution on South Dakota’s official website explicitly prohibits gay marriage. Was South Dakota ignoring the Supreme Court’s ruling by making same-sex marriage illegal?

The answer, of course, is no: South Dakota isn’t ignoring the Supreme Court. Rather, the text of the law -- even on the official state website for the State of South Dakota -- didn’t give the full picture. In fact, the official state website says the exact opposite of the current state of the law.

This is an all-too-common example of the biggest barrier to accessing and researching the law: the text of the law isn’t enough to actually understand it. Context is needed to accurately understand the law. And this problem isn’t just for the landmark, blockbuster legal issues -- the millions of cases, statutes, and regulations that make up American law are just as impossible to decipher without context.

Analysis and commentary that help unpack complex legal issues have until recently existed totally separate from the law itself, making it relatively difficult to find, at times expensive to access, and not easily shareable. Even within a law firm, information often fails to make its way beyond an individual attorney, or a small group of attorneys, and as a result, a lot of research is repeated unnecessarily.

The best resource for lawyers -- and the public, for that matter -- is one where the law itself is coupled with substantive legal analysis authored by experienced lawyers, and both the law itself and this analysis are accessible for free.

The solution: a free resource built by the legal community

Imagine if you could read the law (for free) and simultaneously get all the context and analysis you need: real, substantive analysis, written for a legal audience, that goes beyond the surface to help inform your understanding of a legal issue. Imagine all of this context is provided to you by lawyers, law firms, and law professors who contributed it (for free) in order to demonstrate their expertise to the legal community. This is precisely what Casetext is building right now, together with thousands of lawyers and law firms.

It’s not that substantive legal analysis isn’t already out there. Lawyers rely on it in their practices every day. But where this type of commentary does exist, it’s typically scattered across legal blogs and law reviews, not connected to the law. This puts a huge burden on researchers, making it infinitely harder to find the commentary that is most relevant to what they’re looking for.

So, how do you fix that disconnect? Step one: make the law free.

By making the law free, widely available, and in a format that allows lawyers, law firms, and academics to add insights to the law, wider access to practical legal knowledge becomes a real possibility. The best legal minds are empowered to share their experience and analysis in the place people go to find answers to legal questions. This means that this body of law is not just newly free and available, but also more easily understandable.

A consequence of making the law more accessible is that there’s a bigger audience of people to read the law and legal insights. Over 500,000 researchers look for answers to legal questions on Casetext each month. Even for the subset of those who already have paid access to the law through Westlaw, Lexis, or some other paid tool, the ability to view as many legal documents as they want without worrying about billing means that their willingness to click on one more case or one more statute skyrockets.

Being able to reach 500,000 people -- many of whom are in the position to buy legal services -- makes it incredibly worthwhile for legal experts to share their commentary. Knowing that anyone interested in the laws they discuss would be automatically directed to their commentary, authors recognize the potential for publishing their insights, linked to the law, to maximize their exposure.

This approach isn’t just making helpful commentary easier to find -- in fact, the universe of substantive legal analysis is actually growing. Knowledgeable lawyers who never thought to publish before are now sharing legal commentary because they no longer have to worry about the earlier challenges inherent in publishing: the financial and technological challenges of creating a domain to host a blog, the hassle of submitting to a law review, and the difficulty of finding the right audience. Instead, lawyers simply draft analysis and publish it on an editor designed for legal commentary, and Casetext links their articles to the law and surfaces it for legal researchers.

The researcher and the writer both get what they want, and legal understanding is improved on a huge scale.

Will it work?

To be sure, some are skeptical of this approach. A handful of commentators have suggested that while community-sourced efforts may work in other industries, lawyers are different. Some worry that because lawyers live by the billable hour, expecting them to share is like asking them to work for free. Another concern some raise is that sharing legal commentary, case updates, or briefs could surrender a competitive advantage, revealing secrets and strategies to the opponent. The fear is that a profession that is uniquely adversarial is uniquely ill-suited for collective, community resources.

In reality, free sharing of legal analysis is just as beneficial to the author as it is to the researcher. And lawyers are already starting to realize this.

This trend existed well before Casetext. Indeed, for over a decade, lawyers have been freely sharing their viewpoints and analysis en masse. They do it when they send case alerts to their clients, when they publish legal blogs and practice guides, and when they contribute to treatises, bar publications, law journals, and countless other forums for sharing knowledge. Everyone from solo attorneys to the white shoe firms are dedicating real time and resources to producing valuable content. They realize that it pays off long-term by helping them demonstrate their expertise, build their reputation in the legal community, and attract clients.

This isn’t just a passing fad; it’s industry standard. According to the ABA, over 10% of lawyers and 24% of law firms (including 80% of the AmLaw 200) have a legal blog; many more firms have institutionalized the practice of getting their attorneys to publish regularly. Those that publish recognize that this type of content-creation does not interfere with their ability to charge for their services, because the content they provide for free is just information about the law. What they charge for, and what really gives them a competitive advantage, is their ability to provide advice and legal strategy based off of that information.

Attorneys on Casetext are already eagerly embracing this vision of free, contextualized law, because it helps them do what they’re already doing, but do it better. This model provides attorneys who are offering commentary and analysis with a better platform for doing so. It gives them not just a wider audience, but also the right audience. By connecting their insights to the law itself, authors ensure that the people reading their articles are those who are most interested in the specific issue, and therefore the most likely to understand, appreciate, and admire the author’s insights.

How to change the future of legal knowledge

Building a public resource powered by the knowledge of the legal community doesn’t require lawyers to do something they’re unwilling or unable to do. It actually empowers lawyers to do something many have been struggling to do for some time: build their reputations based on the substance of their work, without having to worry about the overhead of designing a beautiful publication or finding the right audience. Lawyers writing about the law are changing the way researchers access legal information, whether those researchers are other attorneys or just members of the public, like a South Dakota journalist, who want to better understand the law. Together, we are transforming the law from something that is expensive to access and difficult to understand into a free, public resource, accessible in every sense of the word.