SebRollen

Honestly, my focus right now is to make the site useful rather than profitable. This is a side-project that spawned out of needing something like this for my own research, so haven't figured out how/if I'll monetize it yet. The one idea I have related to the graph structure that I think could be valuable right now is letting users "subscribe" to particular sections of the law, with alerts for when there are new bills in Congress that might affect or alter it. The graph currently goes from bills > public laws > USC > CFR, so users could monitor a regulation and get notified as a bill moves its way through congress

Audience is primarily lawyers and legal researchers in fields that rely heavily on statutory law (tax, bankrupty, immigration, etc). I'm blessed to have a plethora of lawyers in my family/friends, so planning on using them as ~guinea pigs~ beta testers. If you (or anyone else reading this) think this is something you might use, I would love to talk more! [email protected]

In terms of monetization, I'm not really sure yet. My hosting costs are very cheap at the moment, so I'm not in any rush there, but I'm imagining I'll build in some more premium features like an API (for other legal-techs), change monitoring (for anyone relying on specific statutes in their work) or team research features (shared bookmarks, notes, collections etc). Open to suggestions here too! One very cool thing about my data pipeline is I've essentially built a connected graph of federal law with tens of millions of edges across millions across hundreds of thousands of sections, and I think there will be a lot of powerful applications of that dataset

The cross-referencing between different corpora has actually been very helpful. I was able to find a typo in the notes to a US Code section through it and submitted it to the OLRC. They fixed it, so now I will forever be bragging about having fixed an error in the US Code haha

If you say "Alexa, stop by the way", it'll get the device to stop responding with follow-ups for ~24h. I ended up creating a routine that runs every night at 4am to lower the volume to zero, automatically say "stop by the way" to the device, and then raise the volume a minute later, and Alexa has stopped with the follow ups

Which is fine, they don’t propose to filter “bad” words in other languages, but kind of funny when that’s one of the highlighted examples, right next to the goal of filtering words. Goes to show how hard it is to filter profanity generally for international audiences