Upon
completing my recent Law Review article, I was tasked with writing up an
abstract. Upon some research on writing the short foreword, I was determined to
craft an abstract that was compelling, interesting, but before anything else,
easy-to-follow. To see if my abstract achieved such clarity, I emailed the short
200-something word document to a few friends who are not in the legal field. I
received a few unsatisfactory different responses from each: It’s well-written, but I have no idea if
it is substantively correct; or, it seems interesting but I’m a bit confused on
what these two legal terms mean; and lastly, reading this confirms that I do
not want to pursue a J.D. I then proceeded to define, explain, and argue with them to try and allay (add to?) their confusion.
This experience was emblematic of the problem many non-lawyers face
when they look at legal documents—they have no idea what the author is trying
to say. And while I don’t expect non-lawyers to read law review articles or an
opinion from the Northern District of California on wage and hour issues,
non-lawyers, and lawyers alike, should have a database where they can find commentary
on legal documents that is written for explanatory purposes. This is where Case
Text steps in.
Case Text has been referred to as the Rap-Genius of the legal
industry, and is a database dedicated to crowd-sourced annotation of legal
documents. While an annotated version of my Abstract on Case Text would have been able to
clear up much of my friend’s confusion, it is really designed for lawyers—and could potentially rival Westlaw and Lexis. The annotations on Case Text can either be explanatory or
general in nature, and can give you insight into the minds of scholars and attorneys who
are experts in the field. Case Text has millions of cases and statutes and
tens of thousands of lawyers have already registered.
The implications for Case Text are exciting and we may soon be able to
read opinions with annotations written by the very lawyers who argued the case.
This is valuable when we consider that the answers to our legal problems may
not merely be in the words of an opinion; instead, the answer might be in the
expertise of a lawyer in the relevant field who has tangled with the same legal
issue—and whose comment is immediately viewable in the annotation!
There is no need to search additional secondary sources on the opinion or pore
through hundreds of citation references. Just look for the highlighted passages
in an opinion and you’ll find the corresponding commentary.
Researching cases on the Case Text database and the ability to
annotate is free for anyone who registers. The site also functions
as a blog database. You can have access to the blog posts of lawyers who have
their own blogs, but import their content directly to Case Text. Case Text categorizes communities for all the major
areas of law—Employment, Intellectual Property, etc...—and interaction between
other lawyers within your field, or prospective field of practice, is facilitated tremendously.
One
concern with Case Text is in the freedom in which anyone can annotate a
comment. This is the same concern that many have with Wikipedia; but, this
should not be too much of an issue if there is some degree of moderator screening on the
comments. Additionally, because of the specialized nature of law,
it will be harder for random people to B.S. an explanation.
In sum, Case Text gives a lawyer, law student, or non-lawyer an opportunity
to receive commentary on legal documents that is vastly different than commentary available on more traditional platforms—Lexis Nexis
and Westlaw. It also provides a blogging center for individuals to reach out
to others in the community.
Case Text can be a great asset, but upon a cursory
search of a few seminal cases, I did not find much commentary or annotations yet.
The blogging atmosphere, on the other hand, seems vibrant and the ability to
connect to other legal bloggers in one place is key. Im excited to see what
the future holds in store for Case Text.
