By Dawn Chase
You're just out of law school, starting a practice, and money is tight. Where do you start building your law library?
Virginia Lawyers Weekly posed this question to public law librarians and attorneys in private practice. Bobbie Denny, librarian for the Fairfax Bar Association, got the list started:
* The Code of Virginia.
* Virginia Reports and Virginia Appeals Reports.
* Black's Law Dictionary.
* A Guide to Legal Research in Virginia, sold by Virginia CLE.
* The Virginia Lawyer: A Deskbook for Practitioners, sold by Virginia CLE.
* Virginia Forms, published by LEXIS-NEXIS.
* Virginia Case Finder publications for criminal, domestic relations, insurance, torts and workers' compensation practices, published by LEXIS-NEXIS.
* Handbooks in specialty areas, published by Virginia CLE.
* Virginia Rules Annotated, which cover the state Supreme Court and Court of Appeals and Virginia-based federal courts.
* Written protocols for the local courts you will be practicing in.
* Virginia Lawyers Weekly, for its coverage of opinions, trial reports and news of legal practice. (They said it — we didn't.)
That list in hand, the next decision the new lawyer must face is what format to buy the publication in: CD-ROM? Internet-based? Or books?
Here you enter a marketplace in which the buyer should indeed beware.
Products offered by different publishers and the different formats they come in can be very difficult to compare.
Elizabeth Terry Long, assistant librarian for the Supreme Court of Virginia's State Law Library, routinely evaluates the legal materials published electronically by CaseFinder, Michie, West, LEXIS-NEXIS, Loislaw and Westlaw. Her most recent comparison will be published in an upcoming edition of Virginia Lawyer, a Virginia State Bar magazine.
Electronic publications are appealing for many reasons, said Donna K. Bausch, director of the Norfolk Law Library and executive director of the Norfolk & Portsmouth Bar Association.
Electronic references take up much less space. Updates are quicker. Searching can be easier, depending on the product.
But lawyers just out of school, where they likely had unlimited research capabilities, can find themselves quickly priced beyond their budgets if they don't look at the fine print of their contract with the electronic publisher.
One point to consider: Unlike book publishers, electronic publishers oftne retain ownership of the information they provide. When the contract expires, so does the customer's access to the information.
Long has a cautionary true story: The board of directors of an unnamed law library got a good deal on electronic legal materials. The board instructed the librarian to discard the bound volumes and consolidate its space to save rent money.
That worked fine for the first year. But when renewal time rolled around, the cost of the electronic library doubled, taking it way beyond the library's budget. Not only could the library not afford to update, but it lost access to the previous year's materials when its lease on the electronic information expired.
And the library no longer had the books to fall back on.
Bausch described a typical scenario faced by new lawyers: They buy electronic research capabilities for a flat rate for the first year. "They think, this is cool. It's like back in law school — it doesn't matter how efficient a researcher I am," Bausch said.
The second year's rate, however, is calculated based on the previous year's usage, under some plans. Add to that the 15 percent annual inflation rate on legal publications, regardless of format or the economy, and "the flat rate skyrockets."
At that point, the lawyer is a captive customer, unless he or she is willing to start again from scratch.
Other features to look at when you're shopping for a research library include:
* How current is the information, and how frequently updated? Bausch provided a website that gives pointers on evaluating the veracity of information on the Internet: www.virtualchase.com/quality.
* Look closely at products that on the surface appear to be the same. Michie's Virginia Law on Disc contains law review citations, Long found. West's Virginia Reporter and Virginia Code, however, contains no law review citations.
* How reliable is the service? Alyssa Altshuler, librarian for the McLean office of Hunton & Williams, raised that question in an October 2001 article in Virginia Lawyer.
"Does the company provide a citation service for its material? ... Are you confident that you will be able to access the company's database any time?" she asked. Does the company provide technical support, training and research support by experienced attorneys or librarians?
Bausch urges new lawyers not to overlook services offered by the public law libraries. Rather than investing in a multi-state research package that the lawyer might use only twice a year, the lawyer might find it more affordable to pay the local law librarian to do the research.
In addition, the law librarians can help lawyers evaluate the pros and cons of different reference products.
October 28, 2002
