Legal Research

Crowdsource your legal research?

By scott

There is an interesting set of posts on the 3 Geeks and a Law Blog about using crowdsourcing with lawfirms to accomplish certain research tasks. They are pleasantly surprised by the quality of results they get back for tasks paying only 10-50 cents per task, using Amazon’s MTurk ‘crowdsource’ work system. The tasks ? identifying general counsels and summarising articles are not hugely difficult, but work well as a proof of concept for the idea.

According to Greg Lambert “I have to admit that I was pretty impressed with the quality of the work. Regardless of if we paid 25 or 50 cents, the work was very good. I’m also stunned by the seriousness that the MTurkers seem to take with regards to the quality of the work.”

Should we in the information community now be worried about crowdsourcing as well as outsourcing when it comes to our jobs? Or should be all be signing up for MTurk now to make some additional money on the side!?

Full post as published by Information Overload on May 28, 2009 (boomark / email).