I’ve been threatening to start an open legaltech consortium for a decade now .
So what would that look like? Well, here’s my rough brain dump that I left as a comment on LinkedIn with some expansion since apparently there’s a character limit. I am also leaving the comments open here so happy to take suggestions or notes.
I think an open legal tech consortium could go a couple different ways, some simultaneously. Also, just to be clear, I would be interested in supporting open content as well as open tech.
I think initially and no matter what ultimate shape, the first project would be to create a directory of open source tools available to legal world and legal tech creators- anything from LibreOffice to DocAssemble to Kubernetes – as well as open data sets like the Harvard LIL Caselaw Access Project that can be used to train or do PoCs of a tool in development. There’s other collections of open content out there that can be found and used on both sides of the legal tech world. For example, I believe Suffolk Law has created a directory of court forms (perhaps in all of the United States?) that would be helpful to a tech creator.
Then it would be a matter if making sure the documentation is there and if not beef that up to make it as easy as possible for someone to use.
I hate the term Hackathon but there’s opportunities for short term community based work that’s more of a Barn Raising where we as a group find a need with an attainable solution (tech or content) and then…do it.
And then if we ever got money I could see hiring professional developers/authors to do the same or do something like what we were doing at Reynen and supporting a containerized hosted collection of FOSS tools that users could more easily deploy.
I dunno man…I keep thinking that the annual legal spend of CLOC members in 2020 was $3.6 billion. Give me one tenth of one percent of that and hold on to your butts.