Free vs Fee Legal Research

There is a web version of a Lawyers Weekly article on the interesting topic using free legal resources for legal research. This article was cited by the Library Boy blog with the following interesting bit highlighted:

"Cost-conscious lawyers may ask themselves: Can we get by using only freely available research tools?"

"Chances are, the answer today is no. But free legal research tools continue to improve as new ones emerge and legal researchers everywhere are better off for them."

The ELLA Head Start program will once again highlight cost effective case law retrieval as part of the seminars on the legal research process. Free resources and for fee resources will be covered as they have been in past programs.

As the web evolves, free resources emerge, disappear, and sometimes reappear. It is important for researchers to stay current with what is happening in the legal information landscape.

Costs, online legal research, and blog searching

Nina Platt at Strategic Librarian wrote a nice summary of the benefits to a client for their lawyer performing online (disbursable to the client) legal research. Her post was in response to an unfortunately worded costs award by U.S. District Court Judge Willis B. Hunt in Fulton County. This little nugget, which was not widely posted about at the time denigrated high fees by counsel in a class action suit, including legal research.

I read the decision a couple of weeks ago, thanks to a post at the Law Librarian Blog, and dismissed it from my mind as punitive comments from one judge about the particular firms involved in one litigation file and their fees.

Nina's approach to this issue is much better. Rather than dismissing the comments as one-off, she takes a permanent approach to the issue. She reminds us of the importance of using technology tools effectively to save time, and money, for clients in the research gathering process. She also allows any future researcher to plug "class action coca-cola hunt costs" into Google and see commentary on the judges costs decision in the context of legal research.

Nina has assisted in the use (or not) of this case law as precedent in costs awards. Thank You.

This scenario is also an excellent reminder to think about using 'public' sentiment and social media tools like blog and wiki searches as we would have used mainstream media along with scholarly legal work in the past.

Blogs provide an excellent source of commentary about the law. Consider the excellent legal blog content represented in the ABA Journal Blawg 100 list or the sites nominated for CLawBies.