The twenty-first century law library: A law firm librarian's thoughts

Law Library Journal

Volumn 101, Issue 4, 2009, Pages 517-523

  Heller, Heidi W ^a  

^a Library Services   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 73949093058     PISSN: 00239283     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Review

References (39)

1. Richard A. Danner, S. Blair Kauffman & John G. Palfrey, The Twenty-First Century Law Library, 101 LAW LIBR. J. 143, 2009 LAW LIBR. J. 9.
2. Id. at 149-50, ¶ 32.
3. See also id. at 148, ¶ 27.
4. Although I do not work at a large firm, I periodically meet with librarians who do and am familiar with their most vexing library issues.
5. Alan Cohen, Competitive Advantage: Business Intelligence - Finding Analyzing and Leveraging It - Reshapes the Role of Law Librarians, Law Firm, Inc., July/Aug.2008, at 6, available at http://pdfserver.amlaw.com/lfi/ LFI-LibrariansSurvey.pdf.
6. AM. ASS'N OF LAW LIBRARIES, THE AALL BIENNIAL SALARY SURVEY AND ORGANIZATIONAL CHARACTERISTICS 2007 (8th ed. 2007), available at http://www.aallnet.org/members/pub-salary07.asp (online version available to AALL members only) [hereinafter 2007 SALARY SURVEY].
7. Id. at 24 tbl.23.These figures include the cost of all electronic products in 2007 - not just LexisNexis and Westlaw. Other vendors may be offering similar discounts to academic law libraries in order to promote their products.
8. Cohen, supra note 4, at 8.
9. This percentage comparison assumes that use in large law firms and large law schools is approximately equal. It is also worth noting that while the mean and median spending among law schools is relatively close (The median in 2007 was $235,000. 2007 SALARY SURVEY, supra note 5, at 24 tbl.23.), there is a much larger difference in the law firm setting, where the median for LexisNexis and Westlaw spending is $2.28 million.
10. Cohen, supra note 4, at 8.
11. See Patrick Meyer, Law Firm Legal Research Requirements for New Attorneys, 101 LAW LIBR. J. 297, 2009 LAW LIBR. J. 17, at 312, ¶ 47 (indicating that "only about 3.6%" of law firm "so-called 'flat-rate' contracts are actually unlimited in scope, or truly flat-rate").
12. Alan Cohen, Law Librarian Survey: No More Sacred Cows, AM. LAWYER, Sept. 2009, at 51, 53. In an effort to address these issues, AALL ran a webinar in September 2009 entitled "Determining the Real Value of Your Information Contracts." WEBINAR: Discovering the Real Value of Your Information Contracts, AALL Calendar of Events, http://www.aallnet.org/calendar/eventdisplay.asp?eid=295&arc=no (last visited Aug. 15, 2009).
13. Median spending was $1.07 million. 2007 SALARY SURVEY, supra note 5, at 24 tbl.22.
14. Median spending was $1.3 million. Cohen, supra note 4, at 8.
15. See AM. ASS'N OF LAW LIBRARIES, PRICE INDEX FOR LEGAL PUBLICATIONS (6th ed., 2008), http://www.aallnet.org/members/price- index-2008.asp (available to AALL members only).
16. On August 8, 2009, members of the PLL-SIS listserv received an email explaining West's non-participation in the Price Index and stating that West "approach[es] pricing on an account-by-account basis." E-mail from Anne Ellis, Senior Director, Librarian Relations, Thomson Reuters to Private Law Libraries SIS (Aug. 7, 2009, 11:02 A.M. EST) (on file with author).
17. LMAs provide an annual price for a designated group of print publications to which a library subscribes. In exchange for lower annual price increases, the library agrees to maintain subscriptions to the print materials for a set number of years. See Amanda Runyon, The Effect of Economics on Electronic Resources on the Traditional Law Library Print Collection, 101 LAW LIBR. J. 177, 196-97, 2009 LAW LIBR. J. 11, ¶¶ 42-47 for a fuller discussion of library maintenance agreements in academic libraries.
18. For a discussion of bundling, see Andrew Odlyzko, The Bumpy Road of Electronic Commerce, at 5 (unpublished paper, 1996), available at http://www.dtc.umn.edu/~odlyzko/doc/bumpy.road.pdf. In addition to "bundling," Odlyzko discusses other aspects of pricing, including differential pricing (pricing products differently for different customers).
19. Id. at 7-8.
20. Danner, Kauffman & Palfrey, supra note 1, at 148, ¶ 26.
21. Id., at 148 ¶ 27.
22. See id., at 144, ¶ 9.
23. Meyer, supra note 9, at 314-16, ¶¶ 55-61; 319-20, ¶¶ 68-71.
24. See Danner, Kauffman & Palfrey, supra note 1, at 154, ¶ 67.
25. The challenge we all face going forward is convincing law schools and firms that creating smaller libraries is fine, but that they should be designed for people. See Bill Goodwyn, ALA Conference 2009: Panel Focuses on Creating 'Zones with Heart,' LIBRARY JOURNAL.COM, July 12, 2009, http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA6670403.html.
26. I want to thank the Philadelphia law firm librarians who pointed out some of these important details when my firm was planning its new space.
27. Firm librarians add intellectual diversity to the law firm environment because they have different sets of knowledge and problem-solving tools. For proof of the value of intellectual diversity in the workplace and a discussion of diverse intellectual toolboxes and their contents, see generally SCOTT PAGE, THE DIFFERENCE - HOW THE POWER OF DIVERSITY CREATES BETTER GROUPS, FIRMS, SCHOOLS, AND SOCIETIES (2007).
28. Id. at 55. ("A heuristic is a rule applied to an existing solution represented in a perspective that generates a new (and hopefully better) solution or a new set of possible solutions.").
29. Danner, Kauffman & Palfrey, supra note 1, at 152, ¶ 44 ("This comes back to the role of either the reference librarian or the student research assistant, which is to be guides to the things that we're paving for⋯.");
30. 156, ¶ 73 ("And also there is the question of the skills to use those books").
31. I often use Google first, and most frequently start with Google Scholar. I am delighted by the easy access to, and increased visibility of, HeinOnline and JSTOR content. A problem arises, though, when users try a Google-like search in, for example, LexisNexis or a controlled vocabulary or non-full-text database. For evidence on how the Internet may be changing our brains, see Nicholas Carr, Is Google Making Us Stupid?, ATLANTIC, July/Aug. 2008, at 56.
32. See generally Meyer, supra note 9, for an excellent and thorough discussion of what lawyers need to know in practice and how academic librarians can tweak their teaching to provide it. In my experience, attorneys use case law, statutes, regulations, ALR, restatements, legislative history documents of all types, encyclopedias, treatises, loose-leaf services, articles and their indexes, sample documents, forms, briefs, practice materials, digests, news, web pages, other attorneys, etc. They increasingly read and have access to material written by other attorneys who are marketing themselves (e.g., www.thecorporatecounsel.net and www.lexology.com are web sites that allow attorneys to submit content addressing current legal issues). If you can name it, you can be sure they use it.
33. The way attorneys use legal resources is limited only by imagination and ability. "[C]omplex tasks are nonroutine, unanalysable, involve processing equivocal information and evoke different approaches to information seeking than do tasks that are routine, analysable, and involve less equivocal information." C. C. Kuhlthau & S.L. Tama, Information Search Process of Lawyers: A Call for "Just for Me" Information Services, 57 J. DOCUMENTATION 25, 27 (2001). It is important to remember that information seeking is only a preliminary activity to "the more significant endeavor of using information for constructing new knowledge to accomplish the tasks and goals that encompass their work."
34. Id. at 26. It is worth reminding ourselves that legal research is not all that attorneys do, and the amount of time spent doing it decreases with years of experience.
35. In my graduate program I was trained to do legal research using workbooks and exercises, and I think they are still a good idea. Academic libraries full of books are perfect learning labs.
36. Prices for some electronic materials are also problematic at academic libraries, particularly databases supporting interdisciplinary faculty or empiricists. See Danner, Kauffman & Palfrey, supra note 1, at 150, ¶ 33; 153, ¶ 56 (questioning law school access to subscriptions of other schools or departments).
37. It is unfortunate that information literacy generally - being both difficult to teach and to attain, and so worthy of attainment - is not more often a part of the core curriculum at primary and secondary education levels. This would give us a stronger base for our instruction efforts.
38. I am borrowing this term from JOHN PALFREY & URS GASSER, BORN DIGITAL: UNDERSTANDING THE FIRST GENERATION OF DIGITAL NATIVES (2008).
39. For example, pages have already lost their meaning on the Kindle. See Nicholson Baker, A New Page, NEW YORKER, Aug. 3, 2009, at 24, 27. Will some of our favorite formats, including loose-leaf services and multi-volume scholarly treatises, become completely unsupportable in the legal publishing industry?