If two heads are better than one, then why should legal research be a solitary pursuit? What if you could put three or four or even dozens of heads to the task? If you could tap into a collective, collaborative research process, it seems fair to say, you could complete your work more quickly and be more confident of your conclusions.

Enabling just that kind of crowdsourced legal research is the goal of two innovative websites. But they go at it from different directions. Casetext starts with simple case law research and uses crowdsourcing to flesh it out with references and annotations. Mootus starts with legal queries and uses crowdsourcing to answer them with relevant cases and arguments.

Crowdsourcing uses contributions from groups of people to create or enhance content, products or services. Examples include Wikipedia, written and edited by authors all over the world, and Digg, where users share news stories and others vote to rank them by popularity.

Related Posts

Crowd Arbitration: Crowdsourced Dispute Resolution Part II
April 24, 2014

Crowdsourcing is a potential source of substantial benefits to dispute resolution. The main reason for these benefits is that...

Crowd Arbitration: Crowdsourced Dispute Resolution Part I
April 24, 2014

Meaningful artificial intelligence is still a far-away technology. But crowdsourced intelligence, which harnesses the collective...

New Legal Research Site Combines Case Law with Crowdsourcing
August 5, 2013

Imagine if you could combine a full-text case law library for research with crowdsourced editing and annotating in the style...