New in the Literature: Academic Lawyers’ Information Seeking Study

The current issue of the IEEE-TCDL Bulletin includes an article by Ph.D. student Stephann Makri about his study of U.K. academic lawyers and their use of LexisNexis Professional and Westlaw. His results support previous studies that have found significant deficiencies in the way lawyers use these systems. Makri breaks the deficiencies down into three categories:

• “awareness knowledge (which resources exist to help locate certain materials),
• access knowledge (whether they have access to certain materials and, if they do, how they might go about doing so) and
• usage knowledge (how to use the electronic resource).”

Knowledge deficiencies were common across all three types, and for students (L.L.B., L.L.M., and Ph.D. levels) and professors alike. Some of the erroneous mental models found in the study are quite surprising. For example, one student believed he could copy and paste only from Lexis. When he searched Westlaw, he believed he had to email cases to himself, and then copy and paste from the email. Concludes Makri, “we believe that ‘getting to grips’ with electronic legal resources, particularly digital law libraries, might be just as important as getting to grips with the legal domain itself.”

Makri plans to use the results of this research in legal information-seeking behavior “to inform the design of digital law libraries.” We can all hope Makri succeeds in developing an error-proof digital library design. Until he does, however, this study should be useful for informing legal research instruction methods as well.