Legal Adda: Another online portal devoted to law

"Welcome to Legal Adda - The Legal Community in India. LegalAdda seeks to build a vibrant community of legal professionals in India."

This is how the the latest additional of online legal director in India introduces itself. Inagurated by the Union Law Minister himself, instead of a resource directory, Legal Adda looks more like a networking site directed exclusively towards law students. With its featuring of the forums, interest groups (a feature which is yet to take off), a directory of events (which also requires furnishing), job-opportunties (on last check none were listed) and scholarships, it looks more to me like a follow-up development of LawEntrance.com along with few features of LegalServiceIndia.com.

While the opening page offers much hope and success, it hardly seems to have gained any popularity (upon which it relies for its successful functioning) for the entire effort seems to be based upon a peer-to-peer support structure with law students helping each other by sharing their project works, papers etc. rather than a content provider supported by the organising team. And it is this very aspect about the site which makes me sceptical about its success for it does not offer much initivative or apprisal for law students to come up and share their ideas and versions; something which has already been tested without much apprecation on sister websites like legalserviceindia, manupatra, etc. for the lack of referee-appraisal or editorial approval makes them a dump yard of all sorts of cut-copied-pasted works which lack the ability to get published in worthwhile journals.

Plus, on last access, half of the links did not work out the way they should (with the content listings blank). It seems like the organising team was in a hurry to upload the site; a reason which gains strength from the fact that the supporting organisation was Microsoft and it brought in the Law Minister to announce its IPR Scholars and so thought it wise to schedule the launch along with.

I hope LegalAdda does not turn out to be one more additional to the B-grade law content holding websites publishing novice and un-reliable content, just like the earlier websites on same theme and philosophy.