For a while, behind the scenes, we here at Nearly Legal have been involved in the Free Legal Web project, managed by the redoubtable Nick Holmes of binary law. The aim of Free Legal Web is to:

•Provide guidance on the law via a user-generated database of articles
•Act as a hosted publishing platform for lawyers to showcase their expertise, with full author control over article management and licensing
•Give an indication of the authority of articles by profiling authors
•Automatically connect articles to primary law resources
•Maintain a comprehensive citations database, automatically updated from public access sources
•Provide direct access to relevant primary law and all related resources via a Citator

And, of course, do it for free, via freely available material.

A pilot project has been underway for some time and that pilot has been based on housing law, given the relative engagement of housing law people in the the early stages of the project. Our involvement, I would have to admit, has largely been fairly passive – our relevant posts are automatically syndicated to the FreeLegalWeb project site, which also contains syndicated posts by others, casecheck case summaries and the pilot citations database.

The housing law pilot site is now live, and can be found at http://freelegalweb.org/

Please visit and try it out. Better still, leave comments on what you think about the pilot site and any suggestions. Better yet, volunteer to get involved by producing authored content. Comments on the pilot site can be left at this link: http://freelegalweb.org/blogs/freelegalweb/

As you are all potential users of the FreeLegalWeb, your views and suggestions are welcome, let alone volunteers for contribution – go on, improve your profile…