Panel: Marcel Naud and David Gold
Time / Room: 9:15 / Cartier (English)
Crowdsourcing has been defined as “the act of taking a job traditionally performed by a designated agent (usually an employee) and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people in the form of an open call”. It has the potential to transform legal practice by collecting and distributing the knowledge of lawyers working on common problems. Lawyers are forever redoing work that they know some other lawyer somewhere – whether around the world or down the hall – must already have done. Crowdsourcing promises to reduce repetitious efforts and improve work quality by exposing lawyers to thinking and research that would otherwise have remained obscure.
In this session, Marcel Naud will introduce the notion of crowdsourcing and provide an overview of some of its application in various markets. David Gold, a lawyer and founder of Spindle Law, a legal research site that organizes the law through mass collaboration, will then discuss approaches to, and the benefits and challenges of, crowdsourcing the law.
What kinds of legal information can be profitably crowdsourced? What systems are needed to make it work? How should quality control measures be implemented to meet lawyers’ demand for reliable information? Why and under what conditions will lawyers contribute their knowledge? How should an in-house collaborative system, such as within a law firm, differ from one applied to public information on the open web? This session is meant to provide helpful answers and guidance in respect of these questions.
