THE INFORMATION-SEEKING BEHAVIORS OF LAWYERS

Legal Professionals

PART I

Legal Research

Requires patience!Step 1-What is your research question?Step 2-Categorizing your question Ex:

Civil/Criminal. Understanding the broad category of your research.

Step 3- Locating background knowledge to familiarize your self with the topic.

Step 4-Looking through statues.Step 5-Finding a relevant case.Last few steps involve continually looking

through cases.

Kuhlthau and Tama Article

“Information search process of lawyers: a      call for ’just for me’ information services.”The focus of this article was examining their

tasks and to see how they are using information to achieve these specific tasks.

Information Search ProcessStructured interviews with 8 practicing

lawyers, 4 male and 4 female from New Jersey.

With less than 10 years of experience.

Contd.

Findings concluded lawyers preferred using print sources rather than databases. K&T

Researcher’s found databases were used more for “routine” tasks rather than complex task. K&T

Relied on other colleagues.

Thanuskodi Article

“Information Needs and Use Pattern of District Court Lawyers of Salem and Erode in Tamilnadu”

Tamilnadu a state located in southern India. A qualitative study focusing on the needs and

use patterns of lawyers of Salem and Erode.A total of 720 questionnaires were completed

and returned. Males 537 Females 183

Contd.

Findings concluded many of the lawyers prefer personal libraries and bar libraries-Thanuskodi

Print resources were preferred over electronic resources, but were aware of electronic resources.

Khan, Bhatti, & Khan Article

Information-Seeking Behavior of Law Practitioners: A Survey of Bahawalpur City

Focusing on lawyer’s information seeking needs in Bahawalpur City. (Located in Pakistan).

Sample consisted of 39 males and 15 females.Findings concluded respondents relied on

libraries and senior colleagues for information. Khan, Bhatti, Khan

When searching for an urgent need of information respondents used personal collections. Khan, Bhatti, Khan

Westlaw

http://text.westlaw.com/welcome/wlto/help/default.aspx?fn=_top&rs=ACCS8.05&rp=%2Fwelcome%2Fwlto%2Fhelp%2Fdefault.aspx&helpkey=KeyCite&vr=2.0#What

PART II

Judith Lihosit and Attorney Apprenticeship

Lihosit’s Discoveries: knowledge base and search strategies are developed through social networks, such as apprenticeship programs, rather than from a textual sources—such as a law digest—or law school taught models, such as the Langdellian model

Alterations to research techniques are most influenced by contact with other attorneys

Hypothesis: “I believe the authors who think that CALR will fundamentally alter the way attorneys practice or do research, and consequently transform our legal system, overstate the dangers” (Lihosit, 2009).

The “Crisis”

Computer Assisted Legal Research (CALR) has prompted a “crisis”

Legal researchers are concerned that CALR will inhibit the cultivation of critical research techniques, stunt resourcefulness, and needlessly inundate the consortium of relevant legal documentation.

Document retrieval is particularly important, as lawyers often consult previous cases to familiarize themselves with a current cases

Prior cases also set precedents that could, if the crisis proves true, be lost in the crowd.

Previous Research

Barkan, Steven M. (1987). Deconstructing legal research: A law librarian’s commentary on critical legal studies. Law Library Journal, 79, 617-638. The Critical Legal Studies Movement (CLS) A liberal interpretation of law; a rejection of its rigid

confines of law “to create a more humane, egalitarian, and democratic society.”

A multiple theory approach—no set doctrine “the creation of a more just society”

Participant Body and Collections Methods

Qualitative study based on a series of ethnographic interviews Lihosit conducted with practicing attorneys and law firm librarians within the San Diego area

15 Attorneys 9 belonged to large firms with over seventy-five

lawyers 3 to small firms with between three and five lawyers 3 worked as independent contractors at a nonprofit

law firm

Research Patterns

New attorneys (recent graduates):1. consulted a broad secondary source—such as a legal

encyclopedia—or a document repository to acclimate himself to the key issues.

2. From thereon, the attorney researched prior cases relating to his research query; for this step almost every attorney utilized LexisNexis or Westlaw. However, he wouldn’t begin his database research until he had a firm grasp of key words to retrieve the most relevant results.

3. Overtime the attorney referred to colleagues rather than secondary sources to gather necessary information.

4. Major Finding: As attorneys became more grounded within their profession, they chose to confer with other experience attorneys before a written source.

Working Example #2

LexisNexis Database

Legal Research and the Ellis Model

 Makri, S., Blandford, A., & Cox, A. L. (2008). Investigating the information-seeking behaviour of academic lawyers: from ellis’s model to design. Information Processing & Management, 44(2), 613-634.

Hypothesis: Because models such as Leckie’s are too abstract to truly define the information-seeking behaviors of lawyers, the study’s researchers “suggest that a particularly useful model for informing design is Ellis’s (1989), which can lead to useful design insights by system designers asking themselves the question ‘how can we design to better support our behavior?’”

Previous Research

(Blomberg, Suchman, & Trigg, 1996): designed an electronic filing cabinet prototype for a Silicon Valley law firm (new approaches to searching)

(Marshall, Price, Golovchinsky, & Schilit, 2001): designed an e-book prototype to act as a wireless access device to information resources as well as support a wide range of reading activities such as annotation (designed by law students participating in Mock Court)

(Komlodi & Soergel, 2002): focused on information use and re-use, specifically legal information-seekers’ use of own memory and electronic search histories to inform their later searches.

Participants

27 academic lawyers from a London University and nearby vocational Law college

data collected through both “Contextual Inquiry-style semi-structured interviews and naturalistic observations,” with verbal protocol featuring prominently in the research methodology (Makri, Blandford, & Cox, 2006).

Participants, cont.

Electronic Resources Studied

LexisNexis

Westlaw

Google

Google Scholar

Findings

Findings: New Information-seeking Characteristics

(strictly defined to electronic sources):

Selecting Updating (direct/indirect) (also noted by Linhoist)

Gaining a understanding of the importance of a particular document

Recording (manual/automatic) Collating and editing

How they filter/categorize the information they retrieve (copy and pasting into word documents, print groups of legal documents at the same time)

Levels

Researchers defined multiple levels at which the lower-level behavioral characteristics can operate with regard to electronic resources:

the resource level: the level of the electronic resource itself

the source level: at the level of the information source or sources within a particular electronic resource

the document level: at the level of a document or documents within a particular information source

the content level: at the level of content within a particular document

lastly, the search query/result level

Common Behaviors

o Surveying (through use of broad, secondary sources)o Monitoring

Active: regular, specific searching within digital law libraries and law-related internet sites (ex. The Law Commission website), bookmarked internet webpages

Passive: mailing lists/listservso Searching: formulating a query, search query refiningo Browsing: very common (restricted the electronic

indexes and abstracts in Ellis’s study)—researchers here defined it at four levels

o Filtering

Uncommon Behaviors

Distinguishing: lawyers systematically evaluate and eliminate sources, unguided by perceptions

Discussion Question

Distinguishing: “ranking information sources or documents according to their relative importance based on perceptions…of how useful they may be.”

What are your thoughts on distinguishing?

Do you distinguish? Examples not limited to academic materials—

Amazon/Goodreads Movies: Rotten Tomatoes New sites: CNN/MSNBC/FOX

Did you employ the technique of distinguishing for this project assignment?

Findings, cont.

Recording: involves making a record of resources or sources used, of documents/content found or of the query terms used or results returned in a search Researchers believe their description of this behavior

is more precise than Meho and Tibbo (2003): “filing, archiving, and organizing information collected or used in facilitating research.”

Updating

Design Improvement Suggestions

Enhance support for surveying Make secondary sources more prominent on the

interface For this reason most academic lawyers prefer to use

Google or textbooks to perform surveying

Increase user’s awareness of how to achieve updating behavior and make system features that support this behavior more prominent Academic lawyers were generally unaware of the

citator tools which can be used to support updatingIncrease awareness of recording