Get your expertise in front of 25 million users
Over the past few years, we’ve grown to be very good (or very, very bad–depending on your perspective) about asking our users to contribute money to support online open access to legal information.
But now we want to ask you to contribute something else that’s vitally important to our efforts to make the law accessible to all: your expertise.
As government gets better at the basics of online publishing for legal information (albeit slowly and incrementally) we want to continue to innovate and to drive the agenda for free legal information, as we’ve done now for over twenty years. It’s not terribly insightful to say that finding and reading the black-letter law seldom ends the inquiry. We’ve always known that, of course, but now we’re finally in a position to really do something more to help our users understand the law.
Begun almost twenty years ago as a series of “About” pages covering major topical areas of law, Wex has grown to more than 5,000 entries ranging from simple definitions of legal terms to in-depth treatments of important topics. We believe that Wex can become a useful destination for a wide range of folks, from those dealing with some singular, significant brush with the legal system (such as a divorce, an arrest, or a will) to those with an academic or hobbyist interest in some legal topic or case.
In short, we’ve succeeded in making the primary law of this country available, but Wex can be a tool for making it accessible. To achieve this vision, we are re-configuring just about every aspect of Wex, and our need for new content is considerable.
If you’d consider volunteering to write for Wex, please follow this link to a very short survey to help us understand what kind of content you’d be interested in generating.
We don’t imagine the survey to be perfect in every way. It’s just a first step to opening a dialogue about matching your interests with our needs as we re-imagine and re-design Wex in the hopes of making the LII the internet’s premier destination to learn about the law, and not merely to find it. Articles in the “new Wex” will be for attribution, so your contributions will be recognizable as yours by whatever portion of our 26 million annual viewers find their way to your work.
Whether or not you feel like you can contribute content to this effort, we’ll keep you posted of our progress over the next several newsletters as we transform Wex into something truly unique and special.
