In the past two days, Casetext has come across my radar three times. First, Bob Ambrogi mentioned it in his “failure of crowdsourcing” post. Then, Cristian Farias asked if I’d seen how it’s trying to be a faux blog. Finally, Doug Berman posted about a faux blog post by a lawprof at Casetext.  Having otherwise heard no mention of Casetext whatsoever, this was pretty friggin’ weird.

I hear a surprising amount about new lawtrepreneurial (that’s the cutesy mash word that entrepreneurs in the “legal space” like, because they tend to be, well, cutesy) start-ups, many sending out blind solicitations in the hope that I, like Bob and others, will post something puffy about how they’re disruptive.  Most are the 27th iteration of something that was tried and failed, offering nothing to suggest they stand a chance of utility or survival.

I was chatting with Lee Pacchia the other day, who mentioned a start-up for criminal lawyers. I won’t mention the business, so don’t ask. It was backed by an angel, a successful civil lawyer, and was run by a baby lawyer who couldn’t find his way to a courthouse without an app. Lee asked me what I thought of the concept.

I explained that while the general concept had potential, neither the angel lawyer nor the baby lawyer had the slightest clue how real criminal lawyers work. Worse yet, their promotion scheme, which made perfect sense to them, would make a real lawyer puke, and they would never be able to grasp why.

This observation lapsed into my musing why venture capitalists didn’t come to a curmudgeon to consult on whether, or how, a new business might succeed.  There is a reason they don’t ask a class of second graders to explain quantum mechanics. If I had to explain why most tech start-ups fail, it’s not because they don’t have the building blocks for success, but the people involved become married to their own, clueless misperceptions of how the real world works. But I digress.

When Casetext’s Pablo came to me and asked if they could glom the feed to SJ to put on Casetext and give them something to fill their blank pages, it was with the usual naïve notions of collaboration, unicorns and rainbows.  I told him that crowdsourcing is a disaster. Not just because lawyers won’t do it, a point I’ll come back to in a bit, but because the majority “opinion” of the self-selected crowd of people who might be willing to get involved doesn’t make it right.

How you gonna feel when someone acts upon the information on your website and gets their head blown off by the cops? How you gonna spin that bit of stupid into a rainbow?

But because I hated the duopoly of West and Lexis, and want to help anyone or anything the screws with their business model of selling us back our judges’ decisions, already bought and paid for by the public, I told Pablo and Jake that it was cool, they could glom my feed (Edit: After Jack Heller read this post, he pulled down the SJ content from Casetext).

Then I found out that they were running a comment section there, even as I was at SJ. I told them to pull the plug on that crap immediately. I got emails of the comments (which were beyond idiotic) and had no intention of going to yet another platform to tell stupid people to get their heads out of their butts.  They complied.

But they also told me of their new initiative, called LegalPad. It was an “in-house” pseudo blog where anybody could post whatever they wanted, no fuss, no muss, and their community of gazillions could read it and adore the author’s brilliance.  Unsurprisingly, there appears to be two primary groups who leaped at the chance. Lawprofs, who needed an outlet for their tendentious pedanticism, and self-promoting lawyers who finally figured out that Avvo Answers will never bring them paying clients.

So will this break the crowdsourcing logjam?  Why no. No it won’t.  You see, according to Casetext, I am a member of the criminal law community, because . . . I have no clue why. Somebody at Casetext signed me up, I guess, to give me a SJ channel? But it’s not like I go there, read there, write there, or could care if it exists.  The number of members gives the impression that it’s huge. If I calculated “members” the way they do, I would have about 50 million. I don’t. It’s not true.

But more to the crowdsourcing point (see, I told you I would get back to it), you’ll get the smattering of bottom feeders and lawprofs too cheap to pay for their own soapbox, but you won’t get real lawyers. There’s a couple dozen specific reasons why, but they boil down to two things:

1. We work for a living, and giving it to you for free so that people who won’t grasp what we’re talking about anyway can pretend they have a clue and ruin their lives isn’t what we want to do with our spare time.

2. We don’t give a damn about your unicorns and rainbows.

And as to the rest of you lawtrepreneurs who just want a few minutes of my time to “pick my brain,” here’s a protip: You’re a for-profit business. Me too. You want my knowledge and experience to help you figure out how to be the only tech start-up that doesn’t die on the vine, then pay me to be a consultant.

I don’t exist to give you free advice any more than I exist to annotate your free content. Yes, I could tell you why you’re not getting traction, or where your brainstorm fails, and sometimes how to fix it, but my time has value. You need my help, but it’s gonna cost you. That’s business.

Update: I received an email from Jake Heller, CEO of Casetext, which included this gem:

If you’d be interested in chatting about it sometime, I’d be happy to share my thoughts.

To which I delightfully responded:

 Why?  We’ve talked. There is nothing I’ve said in the post that I haven’t already told you. But why in the world would I be interested in chatting about it with you? How utterly fucking arrogant of you to suggest that you are “happy to share your thoughts.”

It’s you who wants to talk with me. And you’re more than welcome to my advice and counsel, when you pay me for my time. But to suggest that I might want to chat you? Are you really that clueless?

Now some youthful lawtrepreneurs are flaming, self-important narcissists by accident. They’re well-intended, but dopey enough to believe that they’re very important people.

Heller, on the other hand, isn’t such a doofus. He’s a smart kid, and when he tries to flip it to suggest that he’s happy to do me a favor by giving me his spiel, it’s deliberate.