Holmes on Low-Quality Free Legal Content

Nick Holmes of infolaw and FreeLegalWeb has published Wall of shame – vacuous and inaccurate free legal content at his blog, Binary Law.

In this post, Mr. Holmes summarizes recent posts and articles criticizing certain information providers who publish what is characterized as low-quality free legal content apparently primarily for purposes of Internet search-engine optimization.

Mr. Holmes writes:

The view of many such sites offering free legal information seems to be that because they’re not charging for it and they’re not bound by professional rules or under any duty of care, they can employ unqualified, hence cheap, writers to provide potted summaries of the law which will earn them the Google juice they crave and be useful enough to draw their readers in to earn them a buck using their remunerated services – and if the content is a bit wrong, so what?

Well, the “so what” is that they will be exposed by those who care – about accuracy, about standards and about access to justice.

For more information, please see the complete post.

Tags: Free access to law, Public access to legal information, Nick Holmes, Online legal publishing, Binary Law, Quality control of electronic legal information, Quality control in legal information systems, Quality control of free legal information