Law Schools
By - Wednesday, December 8, 2010 - 1:46pm
On Friday's episode of "Law Librarian Conversations," I'll be on a panel featuring Ed Walters (CEO, Fastcase) and Jason Wilson (Vice President, Jones McClure Publishing) discussing the future of interface design for legal research applications and services. Over the course of the show we'll be discussing several variations of this topic with co-hosts Rich Leiter and Roger Skalbeck. The show's agenda includes:
- Native App vs. Browser-based tools
- What interface innovations can we borrow from other applications?
- Modularity & Interoperability: Will we ever have modular legal research tools?
In preparation for the episode, I wanted to organize my thoughts with regard to a specific aspect of the subject matter. This post may best fit under the broad umbrella of the first topic variation, native apps vs. browser-based tools, but it branches out a bit in a tangential direction. What I want to consider is, what comes after web browsers, and how will law school libraries adapt in a post-browser world?
I don't think it's going to be as simple as browser-based tools replaced by platform-specific native apps. Content and service providers won't simply stop building websites and focus exclusively on their iPhone/iPad/Android/etc. apps. End users won't suddenly stop using a web-browser like Firefox or Google Chrome, and content for those platforms won't cease to exist. HTML or some variation of it will remain a common way for content providers to present information, even information whose organization and backend are powered by other technologies and programming languages. But rather than have users open a web browser manually, the basic user interface for an operating system might be the browser itself. At some point, Google's operating system (be it Android or something else) might just incorporate Chrome as the desktop. Thus, whether you open an app or a location, you always open it within the browser.
Sound far fetched? It's already here. On Monday Google launched Chrome OS and the Chrome Web Store. (They also launched an eBook store and reader, immediately making all public domain Google Books available in eBook format.)
Many apps, and eventually many web locations, may not functionally run within the browser itself, but for end users the integration will be seamless and all look to be part of the same system, regardless of what backend technology a service actually runs on. As solely web-based services increase functionality using tools like jQuery to expand web UIs beyond simple HTML, a user's reliance on a browser's navigation features (in present form) will diminish. The address bar may not need to be visible at all times, and will instead be hidden away in an easily accessible panel, as so many other once-prominent buttons and menu options already are. (Apple's spec for iOS Safari already includes the ability to hide the address bar, albeit in a manner that creates security risks.) Bookmarks will cease to be locked in the browser and will become icons on the OS browser's desktop, with apps and browser-based tools indistinguishable from one another. Everything will be an app and everything will be a web-based tool.
Perhaps law school libraries will integrate seamlessly into this world, providing an app-like experience that both provides useful information to patrons and links to the vendor-based apps/tools patrons actually use to perform research. Or perhaps no matter how hard they try to fit in, they will feel to patrons like unnecessary intermediaries. Or they might feel like nothing.
Imagine a future in which each vendor provides an app or app-like web service for all clientele. When a law student or faculty member wants to access Westlaw, Lexis, Hein Online, JSTOR, ProQuest, etc., he or she simply launches the vendor-provided database icon sitting on that OS/browser desktop. To the patron, there is no visible interaction with the library itself, though the library provides the access itself with a paid subscription. Perhaps the patron has to authenticate through the library the first time they launch the app, but once authenticated, the patron interacts directly with the vendor from then on. (Fastcase and WestlawNext already have iPhone and/or iPad apps. This is just the beginning.)
Imagine further that more and more electronic treatises are available via vendors, rendering a library's print collection into a niche case resource. Thus patrons perform almost all their book-based research electronically from anywhere using direct vendor apps/services.
And imagine still that vendors expand their service offerings to incorporate direct client support for usage of their apps/services. Thus, in a more expensive contract model, when a patron needs help using a vendor application, he or she always gets this tech support from the vendor itself. Maybe this support personnel is in Minnesota or Ohio and consists of attorneys and librarians. Or maybe it consists of cheaper offshore employees who have training not in the subject-matter but the platform.
Maybe vendor service deteriorates in this model. Maybe not. Either way, maybe it's good enough that it's cost-effective, even for the libraries who sign the support contracts and can now reduce the professional staff they employ (i.e., pay), operating successfully on a much lower budget.
Or maybe since vendors are doing everything already, except paying for the school's subscriptions, law school administrators eliminate even the budgetary function of librarians, handling electronic subscription selection directly in the school's budget office.
And maybe patrons won't scream in protest as much as librarians hope they would. Patrons still have access to a wide array of content and, thanks to improved UI design and search algorithms, don't need to call tech support that often anyway.
Law school libraries won't disappear altogether in this scenario. There will still be a need for the print collections, but the demand for them might be low enough that they could operate as closed stacks. The library director becomes more of a curator than librarian, preserving the collection and obtaining limited rare items for storage. Maybe the closed stacks become remote storage. Maybe the remote storage makes more use of robotic technology than human labor. Maybe law schools in the same geographic region combine collections and maintain a single closed-stack, remote-storage facility for the area, meaning only one librarian/curator might be needed to serve four or five law schools.
One might call me a Cassandra for painting such a far-fetched scenario of doom. But for whom does this scenario spell doom other than librarians? Assuming (and yes, this is a big, but hardly impossible, assumption) the end-users-formerly-known-as-patrons are satisfied with the content to which they have easy access, does the direct vendor/patron world look all that bad to them? Or to law school administrators looking to streamline budgets? Or to the vendors who are the only ones developing legal research UIs for the future right now?
This isn't to say there isn't valuable expertise lost in this scenario. Surely librarians are better at legal research resource selection than accountants, and maybe that will save some librarian jobs. Or maybe the accountants won't know this until after they eliminate librarian positions, at which point the accountants will just try to get better at that part of their job. They might never be as good at it as a librarian, but the cost savings might be worth it to the administration.
Patrons might be satisfied with the vendor support they receive when using a database, but who will help them figure out which database to use? So maybe law schools retain one librarian to handle those kinds of questions, or to handle the more demanding faculty research requests. But as I sit staring at a virginal reference statistics sheet for today, unblemished by even a single tally mark, I already know demand for reference desk help is on the decline, and has been for years. Maybe the one librarian retained for reference support is the same library director/curator who's already managing the closed stacks. Or maybe reference service is outsourced to some other offsite professional, one who provides the same service to many libraries simultaneously.
Maybe not. I don't know. This post is intended more as a stream of consciousness exercise than a reliable prediction of the future for libraries. But I do think there is a benefit to acknowledging and verbalizing the worst case scenario, one where law school librarians are gone and no one misses them. If that professional nightmare isn't put to words, how can librarians avoid it—or better yet adapt to it.
There are ways, even in this scenario, to survive. Maybe law school libraries need to look at what available data they can provide to the world and become content providers themselves. Then a law school, relying on the labor of the library, can offer an app or web service to sit alongside the vendors' on that OS/browser desktop. Maybe this means open access law reviews. Maybe it means legal education primary materials and datasets. Maybe law school librarians should take on the responsibility of maintaining primary law collections for the state in which they reside. Most state court systems don't have the budget to maintain decent repositories of appellate court decisions, but if law school librarians take on the effort, such repositories can improve drastically.
Another way to survive might make many librarians feel sick: work for a vendor. WestlawNext, love it or hate it, was a long-term project headed by a corporate vice-president who happens to be a law librarian. (The company insists on calling Mike Dahn a "former" law librarian, which baffles me since he spent the last five or six years spearheading the creation of a massive digital law library, albeit one designed for profit.) Perhaps this may not be an option. After all, Thomson-Reuters is currently downsizing its most visible librarian department. But if vendors provide direct support to legal research patrons, maybe librarians still belong there in some fashion. ("Librarian Relations" is hardly the only role a librarian can play in vendor culture.)
The worst way to survive? Brainstorming ways to artificially insert the library into the research workflow. The fancy word to describe the removal of librarians from the research process, coupled with direct interaction between patrons and vendors, is "disintermediation." Worst case scenarios aside, there may be plenty of librarian functions that will survive for decades to come within law schools. But disintermediation is already happening in subtle ways (or not so subtle in schools with heavy West/Lexis rep presence, not to mention yearly hiring of student reps by these companies).
Travel agents probably aren't thrilled by the disintermediation that occurred when airlines, hotels and car rental companies placed travel reservation functionality on the web. Travelers, however, were thrilled. Disintermediation isn't necessarily a bad thing—unless you are the intermediary.
I'm not claiming to be good at the long-term vision game. In 1999 I told a lot of people I wanted to work for a company like RealNetworks because their RealPlayer product looked more like the future of home video and music than the models embraced by companies like Blockbuster and Tower Records. Nearly twelve years later, however, I don't have RealPlayer installed on a single one of my computers.
But Tower Records is gone. Blockbuster is bankrupt. And every time I watch streaming internet video from Hulu, Netflix Instant or Amazon VOD on my television, I can't help but feel I wasn't too far off the mark.
**
A caveat: As an academic law librarian, in writing this article I strove to limit my pessimistic vision to law school libraries. I know very little as to what makes firm, court and public law libraries tick, so I'm making no predictions for them, even far-fetched ones. I'll leave that to librarians in those respective institutions.
And a tangent: As I wrote about possible future integration of operating systems and web browsers, I couldn't help but chuckle about the fact that this is one of things Microsoft got into so much trouble for back in the 1990s. So maybe if a Google OS uses Chrome as its UI down the road, antitrust accusations will fly fast and hard. Or maybe no one will bat an eye. Or even remember.
Hat tip to Ed Walters for inspiring the title of this post. On reading a draft, he said, "It’s kind of like 'Mad Max' or 'Escape from New York' for academic law librarians."
Photo credit: By Blurpeace (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-3.0 (www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
By - Tuesday, May 11, 2010 - 6:42pm
Like many academic libraries, my institution uses a liaison model to provide faculty service. In short, each member of the law school's faculty is assigned to a reference librarian. That librarian becomes a faculty member's liaison to the library, and any request for library service usually goes through this liaison. Ideally, in addition to waiting for direct requests for service, a librarian/liaison will stay on top of what faculty members are working on and funnel relevant information to them as needed, say keeping track of new books and articles in an area in which the faculty member typically writes.
Maintaining these faculty-librarian relationships are an ongoing challenge of the job. Some faculty like to stay in constant contact, so knowing what they're working on is easy. But others keep a little more distance, either because they're hesitant to ask for help or because they're simply more comfortable working in isolation. Even in these more "spacious" relationships, however, author alerts can be a good way for a librarian to keep track of a faculty member's interests without nagging him or her with unwanted emails and phone calls.
Most law school librarians are probably already aware of such author alerts from Westlaw ("WestClip") and Lexis ("Alerts"). LegalTrac provides them, too ("Search Alerts"). But the limitation of these alerts is that they're limited to what's already been published. If Westlaw sends an email notifying me that Prof. Smith has a new article in the Iowa Law Review, that can be useful in a number of ways, but it doesn't necessarily tell me what Prof. Smith is working on right now. In fact, it may simply tell me what he was working on a year ago.
So, in addition to those alerts, I also subscribe to author alerts for all of my faculty from SSRN(Social Science Research Network). Because many professors post working papers and forthcoming publications to SSRN, sometimes long before a journal accepts it for publication, these alerts keep me more up to date than the aforementioned systems. I'm still limited to what's already been written, not what's being researched currently, but the delay is considerably shorter than what I get from Westlaw, Lexis and LegalTrac.
As far as I can tell, author alerts from SSRN are only available via RSS feeds, but they're easy to access. Simply search for a professor's name. When you find an article he or she authored in the search results, just click the author name. This takes you to SSRN's author profile for the professor. In addition to listing all the articles in the system written by this professor, it provides a link to the RSS feed for the author. Subscribe to the feed using your preferred RSS reader, and you'll be notified whenever the professor uploads a new or revised article to SSRN. (A quick hint: Google Reader seemed to have trouble reading some of SSRN's author feeds, so I run all of mine through Feedburner now and use Google Reader to subscribe to the Feedburner URL for the feeds. It's an annoying step, but it works.) And if you do prefer email alerts, there are plenty of options for receiving RSS feeds via email.
Technologically speaking, this isn't a mindblowing concept. I use RSS for many things, and this is hardly a novel application. However, I don't tend to visit SSRN that often, and as a result I'm not always aware of what functionality the site offers. What makes this tool so useful for me—and perhaps for you—is that I'm seeing works in progress, not long completed publications. I, for one, find this extremely beneficial in my day-to-day job duties.
By - Friday, January 29, 2010 - 7:46pm
As I mentioned in my previous post, I traveled to Eagan, Minnesota (on Thomson Reuters' dime) earlier this week along with several other writers to get a sneak peek at Thomson Reuters' new legal research product, WestlawNext. I've already participated in a video roundtable discussion on the system, but I wanted to go into a little more detail in writing. Several others have provided comprehensive reviews of the product already, so I don't want to duplicate too much of their information. I do, however, want to look at things from the perspective of legal research instruction, since that's a big part of what I do in my job each fall, and because I've written in the past about Lexis and Westlaw's usability from that perspective over at VoxPopuLII.
The simplest assessment is this: Once law students gain access to WestlawNext (and "New Lexis," launching later this year), legal research instructors will have some 'splaining (or at least some adapting) to do.
Research instruction is marginalized and splintered at most law schools as it is. If law librarians -- the most qualified research instructors within any law school -- are part of a required 1L research curriculum, the length of that instruction is often brief. At Loyola Law School, for example, we have five weeks in the fall semester to cover the basics. At other schools, librarians might play no role. Instead, a legal writing program might rely on second-year students to teach the material. At the far end of the spectrum, some schools have no required research curriculum, offering only advanced research electives. Regardless of these requirements, electronic research instruction is often farmed out to vendor representatives, with Westlaw reps teaching Westlaw and Lexis reps teaching Lexis. The reliability of rep training varies, and a common complaint among librarians is that these reps emphasize full-text searching of primary law at the expense of secondary sources and other analytical materials. This leads to a somewhat disjointed program of instruction, even without the ground shifting beneath us.
When using the current versions of Westlaw and Lexis, a researcher needs to know exactly where relevant information is located before running a search. Therefore, when searching for primary law, she has to already know if she's looking for cases or statutes or regulations or some other type of document. In a familiar area of law, that's not a big hurdle, but when researching a new topic, the first task in research is often figuring out what type of law governs. Only then can the researcher move on to primary materials.
Using WestlawNext, however, a researcher no longer needs to select a source database before running a search. Instead, searches are most often limited only by jurisdiction, using a pop-up page overlay (NOT a pop-up browser window/tab) that allows precise selection of both state and federal jurisdictions. Then, upon running a search, the system provides results from all types of sources -- primary and secondary -- in that jurisdiction: cases, statutes, regulations, secondary sources, briefs, etc. The overview page shows just the first one or two results in each category, but the left sidebar of the page lists all the types of documents available with a count of the number of results in each of these facets. To see complete results for a particular type of resource, a researcher need only click the link for that category. When viewing these faceted results, more limiting options appear in the sidebar, such as jurisdiction, date, topic, and publication name depending on the type of materials being viewed.
Generally speaking, WestlawNext eliminates the need for researchers to know where to look for legal documents before running their searches. Don't know whether your clients' issue involves statutory or regulatory law? Just run the search and find out from the results.
To be fair, the current version of Westlaw already allows researchers to search multiple databases simultaneously, but the implementation is poor. Selecting the databases you want is a tedious process, the results display in one lump-sum list of results with no limiting facets, and basic functionality like tables of contents are nowhere to be found when viewing documents from your results. These problems are all dealbreakers, and they are corrected in WestlawNext.
While the relevant sources of law can be gleaned more easily from search results, it presents a challenge to legal research instructors. As legal professionals who have used the old systems (and print resources) for years, we already understand what the various sources of law are and how they work together. To even use Westlaw and Lexis, law students needed to learn this foundation. With WestlawNext (and most likely "New Lexis") providing Google-esque search with faceted results, students can and will run searches without an understanding of legal sources and yet not feel confused by the results. Well, not at first.
Given this likelihood, research instructors will have to provide a solid overview of the sources of law to their students. Hopefully, we already do this. But until now we could rely on Westlaw's database selection requirement to force students into learning at least a little bit about these sources before running a search that provided meaningful results. Not anymore. A student need not understand anything about sources in order to retrieve a wide swath of relevant material, and many will have the illusory feeling that the research process has been simplified enough to eliminate any need for foundational training. After all, if the fact pattern mentions "unlawful sexual intercourse" and "California" (yes, I used a Roman Polanski hypothetical in my class), a student can search those terms and retrieve a California case that seems to be on point and perhaps believe they've performed due diligence. Of course, the governing law might actually be statutory. Or there might be an split among appellate courts in California on the specific issue. Or a higher court may have decided an issue a little closer to the one in the fact pattern, making the case in hand irrelevant.
This isn't a criticism of WestlawNext. Assuming one understands sources of law, the search experience in WLN is more efficient and more likely to provide relevant materials in results. From a single search a researcher can pull in a wide array of materials and browse them easily using the provided facets. A lawyer unfamiliar with California real estate law need not know of the existence of "Miller & Starr California Real Estate" ahead of time in order to easily find that source's information in WestlawNext.
Foundational source issues are already covered in legal research instruction. The problem isn't that we don't teach them. The problem is that students might be less likely to listen once research begins to seem deceptively easy. This makes it all the more important for us to spend substantial time on instruction and assignments that cover the sources of law, independent of the specific research tools and mechanics. The good news is that if the WestlawNext interface is the future of legal research, we'll be able to spend less time in the classroom teaching Westlaw and Lexis navigation, providing extra time for foundational information.
Just because one can search an entire jurisdiction's worth of material doesn't mean that Thomson-Reuters Legal has eliminated the ability to browse and search more specific information. The currently buried Westlaw Directory once again moves front and center in WestlawNext (albeit in a redesigned form). Rather than running a search from the front page, a researcher can browse via simplified tabs on the front page (which thankfully contain no search boxes or checkboxes). From the "State Materials" tab, if a researcher selects California, a clean list of California materials displays, and the search box at the top of the page now limits itself to just a search of California materials. Clicking "All California Secondary Sources" displays a list of state-specific secondary sources and a search box that now searches only these resources. Selecting a specific source, say "California Jurisprudence," displays the table of contents for that source and allows searching of only that title.
It's been said elsewhere, but it bears repeating: Boolean search still functions. Given that many doubters have yet to acknowledge any of my colleagues' statements on this topic, let me repeat that: Boolean search still functions. There may still be some glitches here and there in that functionality, but Thomson-Reuters Legal has made it clear they intend for those operators to work as expected in WestlawNext.
WestlawNext is not without its problems, however, and the biggest concern I have is a big one for legal research instruction: secondary sources. No matter how many times instructors tell students to begin research with a secondary source, many students will still insist on running full-text searches of cases and statutory codes. (I was one of them.) Part of the blame lies at the feet of database reps who consistently overemphasize full-text searching of primary law in their training sessions, but anytime you ask students to find a case, the logical inclination is to, well, search cases.
I won't quibble with the order of the search facets in WestlawNext. Cases, statutes and other primary materials do belong at the top of the food chain because that's what lawyers and law students should be citing as precedent. The problem is how the results within the secondary sources facet display. In these results, very little specific information about each source displays. Most of the time what a researcher sees is the title of the specific section, the title of the source, and a couple of text snippets in which the search terms are highlighted. Little to no information about where within that source the section appears shows in these results. For example, when a section of Witkin and Epstein's California Criminal Law title simply "Generally" appears, that's the extent of the citation information displayed. The precise article within Witkin & Epstein in which this section appears is nowhere to be found, so researchers won't know until viewing the document itself whether it's from an article about sex crimes, robbery or murder. The threaded information available in search results for statutory sections (Title, Chapter, Subpart, etc.) needs to be included in secondary sources as well, or else the results are confusing at best and unusable at worst.
The search algorithms for secondary sources are also problematic. When I select California as my jurisdiction, if there are California-specific resources available on my topic, those need to show up first in my results. Period. When I ran a search for the term "rape," the first 12 results were from "National" sources such as Am.Jur. Trials, Am.Jur. Proof of Facts, and several law reviews. More alarming, none of these were general overviews of rape law, but instead provided information on specific aspects of rape law in various jurisdictions. I discussed this problem with Mike Dahn, vice president of new product development at Thomson Reuters Legal, he assured me that this was not by design and that they were working to make sure jurisdiction-specific resources for a user's selected jurisdiction float to the top of search results, but as of now this isn't working correctly.
Apart from these concerns, I'm still excited by the overall direction of WestlawNext. This really is a significant step forward in electronic research. I hesitate to call WestlawNext a "game-changer" because I think the game changed for all online search providers awhile back. Westlaw and Lexis are simply catching up, finally pushing legal search into the 21st century.
One final thing to note about the progress made here by Thomson Reuters (and presumably by LexisNexis later this year) is that it furthers the gap between the haves and have-nots in legal information. Once these new products are pushed out to law students, the more comfortable they become searching jurisdictions instead of sources, the harder it will be for them to use source-oriented tools (especially print materials). Again, this presents a challenge for those of us who teach legal research to make sure we provide them the foundation necessary to perform research on any platform.
I'm hardly the only person writing about WestlawNext this week. Here's a list of the reviews already in circulation:
Robert Ambrogi, A First Look at WestlawNext
David Bilinski, Dave’s Top 10 List about WestlawNext
Laura Bergus, WestlawNext: It’s About Time
Simon Chester, The Future of WestLaw – A First Glimpse
Jason Eiseman, 5 random thoughts about WestlawNext
Carolyn Elefant, My Trip Out [to] West: A Preview of WestlawNext
Greg Lambert, WestlawNext - A Study in Applying Knowledge Management & Crowdsourcing
Betsy McKenzie, Westlaw Next
Lisa Solomon, WestlawNext Preview: Product and Pricing
Jason Wilson, WestlawNext Review: Ending the tyranny of the keyword?
And of course, be sure to check out Jason Eiseman's video roundtable with Greg Lambert, Jason Wilson and me:
Video: discussion of WestlawNext
