Crowdsourcing

I’m intrigued by the concept of crowdsourcing, and how it might apply to the legal profession. Crowdsourcing is taking a task, and assigning it to an undefined group of people on the internet. An example is the Amazon Mechanical Turk.

Outsourcing and contract work is well accepted within the legal profession, firms will contract out document review, or bring in a specialist when the situation calls for it. But the idea of tapping into the accumulated abilities of the internet, which sounds a wee bit far fetched, is something that doesn’t happen.

I’m just trying to figure out how it would work.

Clearly, the tasks couldn’t be central, they would have to be something like evidentiary matters or some such.  It could be used to acquire evidence about a given intersection or locale.  But I suppose it could also be used as a sounding board for theories and themes that might play out at a trial.

I ramble on this because I maintain that lawyers as a whole are somewhat hide-bound, in the sense that they are reluctant to explore bleeding edge developments.  I don’t mean in the sense that lawyers and the legal profession don’t adopt technology, this would be a patently false contention.  I mean being out there at the border of what technology can do, and more over what developing technology might demand.  I may write more on this, time permitting.

Posted in Law, Ramblings