Startup JD Supra is hoping to merge user generated content with the legal community. Founded by attorney Aviva Cuyler and launched last year, the site enables lawyers, law firms, and legal professionals to publish legal documents online. The source is credited for his or her work via a LinkedIn-like profile on the site. Access is free and anyone can search the database of memos, court filings, agreements and more.
The site takes advantage of the notion that lawyers are active content creators and there should be a centralized place where this content can be uploaded, indexed and shared for free. Consumers are able to use the search engine to find lawyers and relevant cases and lawyers can use the database as a research resource for cases and deals. Searches can be filtered by jurisdiction, type of document, contributor, and subject.
Cuyler says that there are close to 1,000 legal contributors on the site, ranging from corporate attorneys to law professors to legal marketing professionals. There are also a host of well-known law firms and organizations who are currently contributing, including The Cato Institute, Mintz Levin, and The Electronic Frontier Foundation. The site is getting interest from international contributors as well.
JD Supra even has a Facebook application, where the lawyers and professionals can share their JD Supra legal documents and profile on their Facebook page, with either a box on a profile page or with a stand-alone “docs” tab added to the “wall” and “info” tabs on a profile. I’m not a lawyer, but I’m hesitant about the potential of sharing legal documents with a social network like Facebook. It’s a good idea, but it seems to be more of a LinkedIn type of resource.
JD Supra is certainly an innovative way to connect legal content with legal professionals. There are paid services like WestLaw and Lexis Nexis that provide legal content but don’t make it easy to access the professionals who created the content in the first place like JD Supra does.
Super!
Leena said…
Consumers are able to use the search engine to find lawyers and relevant cases and lawyers can use the database as a research resource for cases and deals. Searches can be filtered by jurisdiction, type of document, contributor, and subject.
That looks cool. Lawyers can get access to legal-related info from anywhere and anytime.
I was asked once some years ago (pre-web 2) to explore the possibility of developing a knowledge-based for legal cases retrieval for one of the local law firms. I did some digging and came across HYPO, which was developed at Massachusetts University in the early 1990s. HYPO’s was a legal expert system where it’s technology was developed using CBR (case-based-reasoning). My project never started anyway, because the law firm decided at the end, that such system perhaps not needed.
It was claimed developers that when HYPO was given an appropriate set of facts (input) concerning trade-secrets law, the system automatically generates the outline of a legal memorandum, complete with legal conclusions, cited opinions, hypotheticals, and counterexamples. HYPO supplies its user with alternative answers, not just one “right” answer, which is how CBR system works, ie, it retrieves items that are not only the exact match but also the closest match to the target query instance. Despite the hype of HYPO (if it was judged a success or not , which I don’t know), I am sure that today’s legal expert systems are far superior than a system developed in the early 1990s (HYPO), because research publications relating to application of computing in legal domain has been going on for some years now.
If the hype surrounding the upcoming questioning & answering system from Wolfram Alpha in the next couple of months can live up to what it claims it can do, then this will be an excellent domain that it can apply to, ie, the automated legal expert system, which will tremendously improve the work of lawyers.
Developers who are doing development work in the legal domain, may find the following journal useful:
Artificial Intelligence and Law
A highly targeted Docstoc?
JD Supra is a great resource page.
There are also lots of legal documents on http://www.twidox.com, though they tend to be legal articles rather than case-law.
(CEO of twidox.com)
I think this can prove to be very useful and has the potential to do some serious damage to legalzoom…
and Mike, I really like the new Comments design!
Oops, the correct link for the brief description of HYPO is shown below:
Modeling legal argument : reasoning with cases and hypotheticals
Nice article! Check out my site too at http://macmaniapodcast.com
I know JD Supra because they also stream all those docs out by Twitterfeed. They have a legal news feed for every subject. Totally legal web 2.0
http://scoop.jd...pra-news-feeds/
The legal research industry has been fortunate thus far. Large companies like WestLaw and LexisNexis dominate the market. It is amazing that with the amount of information available free of charge online (via Goggle) that a site like this is only now popping up. I imagine that the next step will be for a company (possibly this company) to build a database of free information that can match the accuracy and size of its expensive monopolizing counterparts.
The legal research industry has been fortunate thus far. Large companies like WestLaw and LexisNexis dominate the market. It is amazing that with the amount of information available free of charge online (via Goggle) that a site like this is only now popping up. I imagine that the next step will be for a company (possibly this company) to build a database of free information that can match the accuracy and size of its expensive monopolizing counterparts.
what is the business model of JD Supra? Where does the money come from?
Or maybe is it a not-for-profit organization?
The problem with JDSupra and LegalZoom for that matter is that the general public non-lawyers thinks that the practice of law is just filling out a bunch of forms.
Most of them think, GREAT, a free place for forms! So they’ll download what they think they need and then go f*ck things up and then bitch and moan about it and one of these days, they are going to sue the companies that provided them.
JDSupra’s goal is not really to issue free legal forms and the law firms secretly are just looking for exposure.
There’s no real business model here…paid premium advertising at best for lawyers.
Full disclosure: I’m an estate attorney and have personally seen how some cheapskate will go buy a cheap form for a Last Will and Testament from Office Depot (or through LegalZoom) then kick the bucket. By the time it gets to me, they’ve just created a mess for their kids. At the time, it was a great idea. Only $19.95 to write down my wishes for all of my property! $200,000 worth of property that is…What a deal!
Morons. Too stupid for their own good.
Look, the kind of work that I do is very focused. I wouldn’t try to go sue an insurance company because that’s not what I do. I certainly wouldn’t go looking for some free form on JDsupra thinking that it would be smart for me to file in court by myself.
One last thing to note:
If you do get a form or a document from Legalzoon or JDSupra and it ends in disaster, guess who is going to be there to support you? Not those companies. They have lengthy disclaimers basically saying “We are not a law firm. This ain’t legal advice. You’re screwed if you rely on us and get f*cked.”
Go get a g-d damned lawyer – f-ing know it alls.
Here’s a list of the sites I go to most often for legal content (you can access links at http://www.whic...ft.com/wp/?p=40):
Free Sample Contracts and Contract Creation Tools
WhichDraft.com (full disclosure: this is my site)
First Draft
Free Sample Contracts
ScribD – Contracts
DocStoc – Contracts
Social Media
Legal OnRamp (Want to hang out with the most cutting edge lawyers around? Legal OnRamp is the social media web site for lawyers and legal professionals)
Premium Contracts
MyLawyer (this is an impressive site, contracts and legal service integrated in one package with a flat fee; sadly, only offered in the UK; the owner is a company named Epoq that does offer a virtual law firm platform in the US called Direct Law)
Practical Law Company (tremendous resource for contract knowledge management)
Premium Matter Management
Mumboe (great Software as a Service (SasS) matter management premium site)
Premium Confidentiality Agreement Tools
BaselineNDA (Pretty amazing application, with some limitations, it can read and mark up a confidentiality agreement for you)
Not Web 2.0, But Free and Useful Sample Contracts
OneCLE
The Electric Law Library
YourFreeLegalForms.com
This is a great idea. The legal publishing world is controlled by a few large conglomerates and is in dire need of being re-aligned. The Lexus Nexus’s of the world now outsource most of this work to the 3rd world believe it or not – you now have people in India and Vietnam writing and editing American law research
I consider JD Supra to be a great innovation for legal document sharing. The momentum they’ve built overtime i quite commendable.
I believe http://www.SueEasy.com was the first to bring about the amalgamation of Web 2.0 and Litigation, with their innovative tool for collaborating and disseminating consumer complaints and Class Action lawsuits.
They how have the Internet’s largest Class Action database, completely user-generated! Which is an invaluable resource for trial lawyers. Since their launch last year http://www.tech...lottery-ticket/ they’ve been providing free services to both lawyers and litigants. Also being one of the most game-changing ideas in the litigation industry i.e. a Client-Directory for lawyers.. as opposed to a Lawyer-Directory which are a dime a dozen! ala Martindale, Lawyers.com … etc.
Apparently their Web 2.0, viral ad plans are extremely targeted and provide an excellent way for lawyers to drum up business proactively. With Yellow Pages ads and cheesy subway posters going the way of the dinosaurs their services are a boom for the legal industry.
SueEasy is now a centralized repository for Class Actions, and they also allow Class Action law firms to collect plaintiffs in large numbers, in one place, delivered directly to their inboxes and blackberry’s! I’d suggest every lawyer to take a look at their ad plans, currently on 70% sale.. http://www.SueEasy.com/ad !
Lawyers, how many times have you posted a request on a listserv or contacted a colleague for filings regarding a similar case? Countless, I am sure. JD Supra takes the leg-work out of collaboration. http://tinyurl.com/c6ttyl
While at JD Supra, check out our free guide to twitter for lawyers: http://tinyurl.com/dhxyml