Kevin Heller of TechLawAdvisor has created a JotSpot wiki to run an experiment in collaborative legal review – annotation of cases. You can find the wiki here, Kevin’s invitation at Between Lawyers to dive in is here, and his post on this at his blog is here.
I’ve been thinking about doing the same thing for a while, but for the collaborative development and annotation of forms of agreements for business law. I see it as “the content management system for the rest of us” – a tool for solo and small firm practitioners to use to develop and obtain good precedents. Forms would be provided as educational tools, and available for download under a Creative Commons license. Imagine – standard forms for a wide variety of agreements, evenly drafted or perhaps in biased pairs, with notes for negotiation, case law, etc.
The idea is still in its infancy and there are definite hurdles to its adoption. Why would people give of their time and precedents, for example – won’t there be free riders? Well, perhaps out of the goodness of their hearts, or perhaps because the Wiki would be configured with a quota management system to ensure that one could not take without giving.
It’s something to consider, so I’ll be watching Kevin’s experiment with a lot of interest. [And yes, Kevin, if you were looking for law.jotspot.com instead of the URL you got, sorry, I signed up for a beta too, and seem to have gotten lucky with the URL :).]
I have a reasonably detailed though still early days MindManager Mindmap on the concept, which I’m happy to share, so please contact me if you’re interested.