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6 PLL Persp. 1 (1994-1995)

handle is hein.lbr/aaplper0006 and id is 1 raw text is: Peterep aeot uese The Quarterly of the Private Law Libraries/SIS of the American Association of Law Libraries FAL. 1994 NEXIS on LEXIS and DIALOG on WESTLAW: Who Should Do the Searching? by Mary Smith Forman, Akerman, Senterfitt & Eidson, P.A., Orlando, FL SK ANY GATHERING OF LAW firm librarians whether attorneys should be encouraged to perform their own nonlegal database research and you will get at least two different answers. The basis for their answers will reflect, among other things, the size of their firm, the law library staffing level that they cur- rently suffer under or enjoy, the type and level of service provided to attorneys in their firm and their role as the law librar- ian within the culture of their particular firm. Now, ask any gathering of academic law librarians whether law students should be taught NEXIS, or DIALOG on WESTLAW, along with legal research, le- gal writing and subject specific courses. While most may not have given it a lot of thought, a few have actually implemented programs to do just that. If law school programs are begin- ning to teach students online research skills that encompass both legal and nonlegal databases, doesn't it behoove us as law firm librarians to embrace this new type of lawyer and continue the educational process begun in law school? The MacCrate Report, formally known as Legal Education and Profes- sional Development--An Educational Continuum: Report of the Task Force on Law Schools and the Profession: Narrow- ing the Gap, was published in July 1992 by the ABA Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar. The MacCrate Report Task Force, chaired by former ABA President, Robert MacCrate, set out to determine skills and values necessary in the practice of law. Legal research was identified as one of those skills. In their report, the Task Force recommended that students be prepared to participate effec- tively in the legal profession, ... that stu- dents who expect to enter practice in a rel- atively unsupervised practice setting have a special need for opportunities to obtain skills instruction, and that law school fac- ulty need to bear in mind not only resources available at the school, but also the char- acteristics of effective skills instruction. What, you might ask, does this have to do with me? I'm in a law firm library and my attorneys have not only other at- torneys to supervise their legal work, but also the librarians to either perform for them or assist them with their nonlegal re- search. What this has to do with me, the law firm librarian, is ten years (more or less) of radical change in the law firm en- vironment and where I see myself a de- cade from now. Where once law librarians were the possessors of the information, the individu- als who took care of the attorney's every information need, we are now the provid- ers of information resources, the law librar- ian/educator. Do I have a large staff and provide the level of service in the library that I did ten years ago? No. I have a much smaller staff and I provide a good level of service, but not the Rolls Royce level that was once the standard. Fortunately, along with staffing cutbacks and the realization that I can no longer be all things to all people, comes a new breed of attorney. Of course, the old breed will never die out entirely (at least in my lifetime), so there will be plenty of legal and nonlegal research for the li- brarian to do. But the new breed of attor- ney has different needs to be met and I, the new breed of law librarian, am here to meet them. My new breed of attorney is com- puter literate, like me; information savvy, like me; and wants to know how to get the information, not just have it provided, like me! In the preface to her book, Beyond Legal Information--Searching DIALOG on WESTLAW: A Guide for Law Students, Rosalie Sanderson states, ... I realized that students needed to move beyond WESTLAW and LEXIS and learn about DIALOG. Sophisticated law practice re- quires access to a broad range of nonlegal information. The University of Florida College of Law Legal Information Center set up a pilot program with DIALOG in 1988 to introduce law students to nonle- gal information through a menu-driven mode of DIALOG. This was long before DIALOG on WESTLAW. As a law firm librarian in Florida, I was able to watch the progress of these law students as they became summer associates and ultimately attorneys who had been taught nonlegal online research in law school. This expo- sure to DIALOG, along with NEXIS, cre- ated the new breed of attorney to which I refer. The pilot program at the University of Florida provided me with attorneys who possess new skills perhaps a little sooner than everyone else. That, along with staff- ing cutbacks in the late 1980's, helped me to focus not only on survival, but on suc- cess. And as we all know, the key to suc- cess is the ability to change with the envi- ronment. There are, of course, issues of qual- ity and cost-effectiveness. Quality remains an essential element in research regardless of who performs the work. Those attor- neys who desire to learn nonlegal research methods do so, at this point in time, be- cause they want to learn, not because it is a requirement of their work. If I can edu- cate one law firm associate on the art of performing quality nonlegal research, I will have produced, theoretically, one poten- tial partner or shareholder who will have a greater appreciation of not only the library, but the librarian who educated him. And, (continued on page 4) !51[![ VOLUME 6 ISSUE 1 I

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