Law Department Management Blog
It’s not crowdsourcing, quite, but the potential can be seen for lawyers to use computer databases to augment their own inputs. One precedent for this we already know: document assembly. With that genre of software, input from a user allows the database to put together a document or answer a question. Human knowledge is amplified by the software.
As outlined in Bloomberg Businessweek, Nov. 14, 2011 at 49, in a profile of Panagiotis Ipeirotis, there was an example of software that developed a taxonomy of terms and suggested terms to users. Software designed for lawyers could bring up related documents or paragraphs of possible use. That capability could help lawyers search and organize more comprehensively.
It may take collective action by several law departments to accumulate a repository sufficient to be worthwhile. Or service providers with the raw material may add cooperative software. Either way, the era of augmented cognition for lawyers is upon us (See my post of Aug. 9, 2010: software that complements decision-making with 6 references.).