Legal Research

JD Supra Combines Business Networking & Document Repository

Since its launch earlier this week, JD Supra is already creating quite a buzz around the blawgosphere. It's a combination business networking site and shared document repository for legal professionals - quite ingenious actually. And it's all free.

As a Business Networking Site:
JD Supra offers legal professionals and organizations a chance to showcase their work. Individuals, firms or organizations create profiles for themselves in which they describe their expertise, practice areas, educational background, etc.

Once the profile is created, individuals or organizations can post documents - court filings, articles & newsletters, and legal forms. "The more documents you post on JD Supra, the more exposure you receive. Each document you post advertises your experience and the quality of your work."

As a Shared Document Repository:
As more and more legal documents are shared, JD Supra is quickly becoming an important tool for legal researchers, too. It's not only that JD Supra is facilitating the sharing of legal content - there are other sites do that, like DocStoc or Scribd - but what makes it unique is that it is able to lend some authority to those documents by tying them to author profiles. As a librarian, I'm much more likely to rely on a source when I can verify the expertise of its author.

There are already lots of documents available, including numerous items from the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Morrison & Foerster. Justia reports that they are in the process of doing a major data upload of the higher quality briefs and filings aggregated from Pacer.

As I said, JD Supra is creating quite a buzz, and rightly so. To read more, check out the ABA Journal, WSJ law blog, and Robert Ambrogi's Law Sites to name just a few.

Full post as published by WisBlawg - From the UW Law Library on February 28, 2008 (boomark / email).