I recently finished reading a fascinating new book, Crowdsourcing, which outlines the phenomenal growth of crowd-powered products, content and information, such as kiva, Threadless, and istockphoto.  While I was discussing the book with others and wondering how to harness the ‘crowd power’ of attorneys, we were a bit lacking in ideas. Use groups of attorneys to design a new logo for a program? Write a book or treatise? Research an issue? Tap into law students and their eagerness to do research? Develop forms or collect and comment on court decisions?

With all these questions, the one prevailing question was ‘Why is it so difficult to harness the power of a crowd of lawyers?’ Is it because lawyers are not known for collaborative work, particularly when it comes to sharing practice-related information? Generally, document sharing among attorneys has been behind the scenes, almost secretive.  Forums for lawyers usually suffer the same fate – either so private it has no broader use or so underutilized that it has no value at all. E-mail list-servs have fared much better, especially those at the MSBA, but there are downsides to an e-mail based system: 1) like document sharing, participants often engage in ‘off-list’ sharing, depriving the group of otherwise useful information and 2) list-servs do not have the power to organize and promote the best ideas and content, as do crowdsourcing models. The best do not rise to the top – they just get lost in the shuffle.

The current legal services model also values secrecy, lest you give away an advantage to the ‘other side’ or reveal a client confidence. While that is true, especially in litigation and in client communications, it should not limit attorneys from collaborating more for the benefit of the profession, particularly if the sharing and collaboration speeds up our work, distinguishes us from the growing ranks of ‘non-lawyer specialists,’ and makes it easier to do what we are most readily paid for: thinking, analyzing and advising.

This is not to take away from the lawyers who already volunteer and provide incredibly useful products and information, such as the attorneys who help practicelaw develop probate forms, or the attorneys who participate regularly in drafting and developing Uniform Conveyancing Blanks.  But the number of those attorneys is less than a few dozen. I’m talking about a crowd of attorneys in the several hundred, even thousands. After all, there are more than 25,000 licensed attorneys in Minnesota, 16,000 of which are MSBA members.

Recently, we launched a very simple ‘crowdsourcing’ project: collect and compile a directory of probate-related county contacts. Its mission and approach are simple: post a form for attorneys to use to provide information that they likely already have, then share that information more widely once it is finally collected. Attorneys power the collection, we power the distribution. So far,  in two days, attorneys have provided contacts for 16 of Minnesota’s 87 counties. It’s a promising start, but by no means a meaningful assessment of the power of a crowd. For that, we’ll have to wait a bit longer and see how readily lawyers can cooperate in making the profession more efficient, collaborative, and responsive to increasing technology and client demands. If you have ideas on how to do that, we are all ears.