What I learned from this session:
Natalie Wieland’s paper was full of practical pointers, not only about legal research training but about legal research itself. Most importantly, legal research is a skill which must be continually learned and relearned - this applies to everyone: law students, graduates, partners and librarians.
I liked her attitude about teaching legal research, not apologetic at all, but in your face. If new graduates knew how important these skills were, they would be banging on our doors for training. But generally this isn’t happening, so we need to be more proactive about motivating them to want to learn these skills. This may involve doing things which aren’t so “nice”, like exploiting their anxieties and competitiveness and even rubbing their faces in their own ignorance.
My disclaimer: This is not a verbatim record of these sessions. I have attempted to be accurate, but I am not a transcriber. These are just my recollections aided by very rough contemporaneous notes. I welcome comments clarifying or expanding on or correcting these notes.
The power and the passion: teaching legal research
Natalie Wieland, Bliss Consulting
Natalie Wieland has been working as a consultant, specialising in providing electronic legal research training for law firms. She has recently been recruited to the other side of the fence and is now helping Melbourne University to improve the research quality of their graduates.
In her new position, she has started “Get ready for work” classes for final year students. She initially planned for 15 people attending this voluntary class, but was surprised to find that 115 students have expressed interest. It shows that law students can become interested in these courses if given the right motivation and marketing.
Natalie has been able to reach these students by targeting their ambition and anxiety. She has drawn attention to their failings as researchers. In law school, poor research only has limited consequences. Working in a law firm, poor research will really hurt you.
Legal research is not something which you can learn once in a course and retain forever. The key thing about legal research is that it is a skill that must be developed and practiced and relearned over time.
The learning process never stops, not even for people who do it everyday like reference librarians – we may develop sloppy habits or fail to take into account new research tools.
With law students and graduates in firms, we should be training them with a view to giving them a good grounding in research so that they will be able to relearn these skills. Library training should be well regarded as the key to learning an essential lawyering skill.
Natalie has assisted two main types of people in law firms.
Graduates – we need to accept that when it comes to legal research, they will never hit the ground running.
Senior associates and partners – who may be uncomfortable with online research methods and delegate it to more junior staff. These people may not like research and avoid it, but they can be motivated to improve their skills by two magic words, “risk management”. They may be able to delegate much of their research work, but they cannot escape the responsibility of overseeing the research that is done on their behalf. After all, they are the ones who will ultimately be accountable if this research is of poor quality or took too long or cost too much.
Natalie has noticed that generally the junior lawyers have good computer skills but poor research skills. The senior lawyers usually understand the research process, but they might be really bad with computers. It’s best to train these two groups separately.
Research is hard. It can be different every single time. It really is a skill which evolves and grows. Research expertise will also diminish if the skill is not used regularly enough. Learning a skill is pointless if there's no opportunity to practice these skills.
There are some people who will never willingly come to training, but will call us if they need help. Sometimes we won’t be around when they need help. Can we design our research guides and cheat sheets so they can work if there’s no librarian around to translate them?
Most of the time law students and new graduates can find something “kinda useful” but they rarely know what they’re doing or how they reached what they found. Natalie thinks that 10% of research grades should be based on a research trail, so people can become conscious of the process they’re using.
They just seem to arrive in places, not really understanding what resources they’re using. Could it be that when these different database are just different links on the intranet, they seem to become interchangeable?
Library training shouldn’t be viewed as just library training. It doesn’t matter if librarians aren’t lawyers. Our familiarity with research processes and resources is valuable knowledge which we have to offer.
There are some artificial things about legal education which can cause a graduate all sort of problems when they are start working in a firm.
- They spend a lot of time using case books which creates a spoon-fed mentality. In this mentality, the legislation in front of you is static and is never repealed or amended. It’s never necessary to do additional research such as finding extrinsic materials for statutory interpretation.
- Everything is pigeon-holed into subjects, and students never need to develop the generalist skill of identifying the correct area of law. After all, clients don’t walk in the door saying, “Hi, can you help me with this Equity problem?”
- Assessment is often exam-based, where research skills aren’t taken into account at all.
When a new graduate starts working in a firm, they may find that the work they are given is random, and could be about anything. It also needs to be done very quickly. The other difference is that in law school, students have access to a huge range of expensive research resources, but are usually kept in the dark about how much these can cost. In the firm they will have access to fewer resources and they will need to think about the cost of their research. These differences can make graduates in firms very anxious.
When it comes statutory research, we can’t assume that a graduate knows anything. They can be completely stumped by point in time research, especially if it involves print resources.
Some key concepts in legal research
1. Know the resources
Thanks to Google and Wikipedia, people have no idea of what they’re doing and so seek out Google-like interfaces in other resources. They like the big general searching across all of Law Book Co Online or LexisNexisAU, because they have no idea about which part of these huge databases is relevant to their research.
They don’t understand why they can’t link to the authorised CLR version of a decision.
Imagine if we went to a doctor with a medical problem, and the doctor said, “Hmm, I’m not really sure but Google will have the answer.” We probably wouldn’t be very impressed with that doctor. Let’s try not to emulate that approach in our legal research.
2. Research methodology
It’s not just about showing students how to use boolean operators, first we need to teach the process. Things like searching from broad to narrow (755 cases is not a good result!), being aware of synonyms. Finding extrinsic materials is all process based.
Another part of this is not falling into traps such as over-relying on the symbols used in the citation databases. Sometimes the cases flagged with negative treatment might be exactly what you need.
3. Asking the right questions
- New graduates should get used to asking these questions when they receive a research task:
- When do you need this by?
- How much time should I spend on this?
- What’s the relevant jurisdiction?
- Are you expecting results? Sometimes people just want to confirm that something isn’t there.
- Should I pay for any relevant resources?
If they have any difficulties, they should contact the library - sooner rather than later.
4. Being accountable for your time and expenses
This comes down to knowing when to stop.
Marketing legal research training
Natalie concluded by mentioning more ways of motivating people to be interested in legal research training.
Put the resources into context. “Are you interested in finding recent decisions and legislation in property law?” is much more effective than a course called “Lexis training.” Adults will not learn unless they want to, this contextual information helps people decide if they want to learn or not.
Demonstrate how little they know about the topic. Once Natalie asked students to find a 1982 amending act which was not online.
Tap into their anxieties. “What if it’s not on Google or Austlii?” For senior people, “Do you know how your staff are researching?”
Advertise your training. There are lots of other things going on and we need to compete with those.
Don’t forget the 3 yawn rule. If there are 3 yawns, you’ve lost them, and it’s time to change your approach.
