Legal Research

Docstoc Shares Legal Documents, But Are They Reliable?

Denise Howell over at Lawgarithims has good things to stay about Docstoc, a "user generated community where you can find and share professional documents." There are tons of sample legal and business forms to be had, not to mention law school outlines and bar exam resources. Seems a lot like Scribd but with more legal content.

The content is extensive to be sure, but the lack of authority scares me. I was troubled that so many Docstoc documents are of anonymous authorship, and even when authorship is listed, authority is certainly not guaranteed.

As a librarian, I'm constantly advising people to pay attention to the source when replying upon information from the Web. This is particularly important for legal information where so much as a misplaced comma can cost millions.

I'll all for social networking and building up the information commons, but legal contract language does doesn't strike me as something I'd be willing to trust to an unknown author. But, maybe I'm being overly cautious and not appreciating the whole social networking dynamic. What do you think?

Full post as published by WisBlawg - From the UW Law Library on February 04, 2008 (boomark / email).