Teaching cost-effective research skills: Have we overemphasized its importance?

Legal Reference Services Quarterly

Volumn 29, Issue 2, 2010, Pages 149-163

  Gotschall, Sarah ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA   (United States)

Author keywords

Cost; Law students legal research; Online services; Teaching

Indexed keywords

EID: 77952527024     PISSN: 0270319X     EISSN: 1540949X     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/02703191003757245     Document Type: Article

References (66)

1. Many of these titles are depressingly amusing: Thomas A. Woxland, Why Can't Johnny Research? or It All Started with Christopher Columbus Langdell, 81 L. Lib. J. 451 (1989)
2. Robin K. Mills, Legal Research Instruction in Law School, the State of the Art or, Why Law School Graduates Do Not Know How to Find the Law, 70 L. Lib. J. 343 (1977)
3. I. Trotter Hardy, Why Legal Research Training Is So Bad: A Response to Howland and Lewis, 41 J. Leg. Educ. 221 (1991)
4. Donald J. Dunn, Why Legal Research Skills Declined, or When Two Rights Make a Wrong, 85 L. Lib. J. 49 (1993).
5. Thomson West, White Paper: Research Skills for Lawyers and Law Students, http://west.thomson.com/pdf/librarian/Legal Research white paper.pdf (2007).
6. Id. at 2.
7. Id. at 4.
8. According to town hall forum moderator Bob Berring who is quoted in the report, "Gather any group of law librarians together and you can quickly collect a hatful of horror stories and heart-rending tales."
9. Id. at 2. No information about the survey sample size or respondents was given.
10. Id. at 5.
11. Meyer sent his survey to multiple American Association of Law Libraries chapter listservs and received 162 valid responses from law firm librarians. He later reported his full findings in an article in Patrick Meyer, Law Firm Legal Research Requirements for New Attorneys, 101 L. Lib. J. 297 (2009).
12. Id. at 7.
13. Id. at 5.
14. Thomson West, Thomson West Town Hall Meeting at AALL: Research Skills for Lawyers and Law Students, http://west.thomson.com/pdf/librarian/Atty Research SkillsAALL.pdf (accessed Aug. 9, 2009). Roundtables were conducted with sixty-two academic, firm, and government librarians. No information about the firm sizes of participants was given.
15. Id. at 15.
16. Id. at 12.
17. Todd M. Venie, Essential Research Skills for New Attorneys: A Survey of Academic and Practitioner Law Librarians, April 2008 http://etd.ils.unc.edu/dspace/bitstream/1901/494/1/paper.pdf (accessed August 10, 2009). The article is an unpublished master's paper for the School of Information and Library Science of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The author distributed the survey through the Southeastern Chapter of the American Association of Law Libraries and Law Librarians Society of Washington, DC, listservs and received 122 responses. Respondents were not asked to specify the number of attorneys who worked at their firms.
18. Id. at 25-26. It tied for second with the ability to use finding tools such as indices, tables of contents, and digests. The winning choice was the ability to formulate a research strategy. It is interesting that academic librarians thought that the ability to conduct cost-effective research was considerably more important than firm librarians.
19. Joan S. Howland & Nancy J. Lewis, The Effectiveness of Law School Legal Research Training Programs, 40 J. Leg. Educ. 381, 387 (1990).
20. Id. at 382.
21. Id. at 387.
22. Head of public services and adjunct assistant professor of legal research.
23. I worked in the Customer Support Department at LexisNexis in Dayton, Ohio, from 1999 to 2005.
24. My coteacher and I.
25. We were also curious about other things such as how many hours a day students spent conducting research during the summer and how often they used print and free Web sites for re- search. Apparently, we are not the only law librarians interested in improving instruction by gather- ing information about students' summer research experiences. A Web search revealed references to similar surveys (with no published results) conducted at other law schools: Duke University School of Law, The Goodson Blogson: News and Announcements from the J. Michael Goodson Law Library at Duke: Tell Us Your Summer Research Story, http://dukelawref.blogspot.com/2009/02/tell-us-your-summer-research-story.html (accessed Aug. 10, 2009) (the library conducted a 2008 survey entitled "Summer Re- search Experience Survey")
26. Cornell University Law School, 2008 Student Summer Research Survey, http://library2.lawschool.cornell.edu/survey/legressurvey2008.htm (accessed Aug. 10, 2009) (the library conducted a 2008 survey to "gauge how legal research on the job is changing and to adjust instruction accordingly").
27. At Stanford Law School, two librarians, Erika V. Wayne and J. Paul Lomio, published their survey results in Erika V. Wayne & J. Paul Lomio, Book Lovers Beware: A Survey of Online Re- search Habits of Stanford Law Students, Robert Crown Law Library Legal Research Paper Series, No. 2, http://www.law.stanford.edu/publications/projects/papers/OnlineResearchSurveys.v211.pdf (June 2005).
28. SurveyMonkey was used to create a nineteen-question survey about students' summer research practices and experiences. The survey was e-mailed to all second- and third-year students (approximately 307) during the first week of classes in the fall semester of 2007. Paper copies were also available in the lobby. Eighty-six completed surveys were collected (21 paper and 65 electronic) for a total response rate of 28%. The survey respondents were almost equally split between second- (47.7%) and third-year (50%) students. The remaining 2.3% chose the designation "other."
29. The categories for employment were slightly different in the 2007 survey. The largest firm size category was "firms with more than 25 attorneys." This was divided into narrower categories in the 2009 survey: "firms with 26 to 99 lawyers" and "firms with more than 100 lawyers." In 2007, the largest percentage of students (19.8%) worked at government agencies followed by those who worked for firms with more than 25 attorneys (18.6%), judges (10.5%), legal aid organizations (9.3%), prosecutors (7%), firms with 11 to 25 attorneys (7%), firms with 2 to 10 attorneys (4.7%), solo practitioners (4.7%), public defenders (3.5%), and corporate counsel (1.2%). Fourteen percent worked for "other" employers.
30. The numbers are roughly similar to the postgraduation statistics for the class of 2008: law firms (45% [50% after judicial clerkship year]), government (20%), judicial clerkship (18.5%), nonlegal (6%), academic/master's of law (LLM) (4%) corporate legal (3%), public interest (20%), and military (1.5%). These employment statistics were obtained from the career services department at the James E. Rogers College of Law and are on file with the author. The statistics did not include a breakdown by size of firm.
31. The questions were phrased as follows: "How important was cost containment/cost-effective research to your organization?" and "How important was cost containment/cost-effective research in your choice of research sources/format?"
32. Importance of research costs to employers: "not important" (53.3%), "somewhat important" (21.3%), "important" (13.3%), and "very important" (12%). Importance of cost considerations on choice of research sources or formats: "not important" (61.8%), "somewhat important" (19.7%), "important" (9.2%), and "very important" (9.2%).
33. Olufunmilayo B. Arewa, Open Access in a Closed Universe: Lexis, Westlaw, Law Schools, and the Legal Information Market, 10 Lewis & Clark L. Rev. 797, 824 (2006).
34. AALL, The Biennial AALL Salary Survey and Organization Characteristics 19, (AALL 2009). The average number of attorneys employed at the respondents' firms was 128.
35. Howland & Lewis, supra n. 14, at 382.
36. Meyer, supra n. 6.
37. Meyer, supra n. 6, at 311.
38. AALL, supra n. 27, at 27.
39. Howland & Lewis, supra n. 14.
40. I. Trotter Hardy, Why Legal Research Training Is So Bad: A Response to Howland and Lewis, 41 J. Leg. Educ. 221, 222 (1991).
41. Id. at 221-222.
42. He cites Robert MacCrate, The Hidden Majority, 74 ABA J. 1, 8 (April 1988).
43. ABA, Lawyer Demographics, 2009, http://www.abanet.org/marketresearch/resource.html# Demographics (accessed August 10, 2009). The most recent statistics available were for 2000. Seventy-six percent of firms have 2 to 5 lawyers, 13% have 6 to 10 lawyers, 6% have 11 to 20 lawyers, 3% have 21 to 50 lawyers, and 1% have 51 to 100 lawyers.
44. Charges are incurred based on time spent online.
45. Charges are incurred for each search in a database.
46. Arewa, supra n. 26, at 830-831.
47. According to the 2009 Schedule A Westlaw Subscriber Agreement obtained from Westlaw (on file with the author), transactional search charges range from $0 to $292.
48. Kendall F. Svengalis, Legal Information Buyer's Guide & Reference Manual 149 (R.I. L. Press 2009).
49. Thomson D West, Westlaw Subscription Options, http://west.thomson.com/support/westlaw/subscriptions/default.aspx (accessed Aug. 9, 2009)
50. LexisNexis, Total Practice Solutions, http://www.lexisnexis.com/law-firms (accessed Aug. 9, 2009). When I worked at LexisNexis, we were told to refer nearly all pricing inquires to a sale representative because the cost of a subscription depended on the number of users and the sources included in the plan.
51. Svengalis, supra n. 40, at 149.
52. Id. at 146.
53. Heidi W. Heller, The Twenty-First Century Law Library: A Law Firm Librarian's Thoughts, 101 L. Lib. J. 517, 518-519 (2009).
54. Meyer, supra n. 6, at 312. In his survey of 162 mostly large-firm librarians, only 3.6% said that their flat rate plans are truly unlimited in scope. Of the 162 librarians, 5 worked at firms with 1 to 15 attorneys, 23 with 26 to 50 attorneys, 46 with 51 to 100 attorneys, 42 with 101 to 200 attorneys, and 46 with 200+ attorneys.
55. Svengalis, supra n. 40, at 149.
56. Id. at 145.
57. Id. at 143.
58. I know this from working at LexisNexis.
59. This is certainly the case with LexisNexis.
60. Svengalis, supra n. 40, at 149.
61. Eighty percent of students reported that they had access to Westlaw, and 53% reported they had access to LexisNexis.
62. These students' results were consistent with reports of practicing attorneys nationwide. As part of the 2009 ABA technology survey, attorneys of all firm sizes were asked what type of pricing plan(s) they had for their major online legal research provider. As with the students, a surprising number (21%) of respondents reported they did not know what type of plan they had. A majority (68.8%) of respondents had a "negotiated flat rate" plan. Of the remaining respondents, 0.9% reported having a "full price" plan, 6.8% an incremental (hourly, daily, weekly) plan, 3.1% a "pay as you go plan," 1.9% some "other" type of plan, and 0.8% reported having no major online research provider. The respondents were not asked to specify whether they had the option to go outside their plans to search non-plan sources. ABA, 2009 American Bar Association Legal Technology Survey Report: Online Research Volume 44 (ABA 2009).
63. William D. Henderson & David Zaring, Young Associates in Trouble, 105 Mich. L. Rev. 1087, 1098 (2007). In 2005, 30.2% of new associates hired by the 250 largest firms attended the top-ten law schools.
64. ABA, supra n. 52.
65. It is a shame that legal research gets such short shrift in law schools because students reported that legal research consumed a substantial part of their day during the summer. Seven percent of students reported spending almost all day on legal research, 45% reported spending four to six hours, 36% reported two to three hours, 10% reported one hour, and 3% none.
66. In retrospect, I realize that this would have been a good question to ask in the survey!