Faster, cheaper, and better? Legal research may include finding a form, locating a rule, identifying a statute, gaining background information on a regulation. If years ago, legal research was a book-based process, nowadays, thanks to the Internet and progress in search technology, an entire universe of information is available. Copyright © 2012 Legaco LLC. All rights reserved. Permission required for reproduction. Contact us for permission to reproduce.

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Legal research, books, and the Internet - A sea change?
?? What is legal research? ??
Felix Frankfurter described legal research as requiring ?the poetic quality of the imagination that
sees significance and relation where others are indifferent or find unrelatedness; the synthetic
quality of fusing items theretofore in isolation; above all the prophetic quality of piercing the
future, by knowing what questions to put and what directions to give to inquiry.?1
More factually, through legal research, we verify the laws and legal theories and try to
understand their effects on the situation of our client. 2
But legal research has changed dramatically with the rise of technology. Electronic resources are
now overwhelmingly used and the ?intuitive, on-the-fly searching, supported by the familiar law of
the digest system? that had characterized legal research for decades has become unfashionable.
3
?? Faster, cheaper, and better? ??
However, even if legal professionals have voted in favor of electronic resources vs. printed
books, is electronic research really faster, cheaper, and better?
1. Faster? In terms of the speed of research, it seems that there is little downside to the
preference for electronic research.
Research results appear quickly on our computer screens, far outstripping the time it takes to
locate the right books and work through topics and key numbers, annotations, indexes, and
articles to find the relevant authorities.
In fact, we are so accustomed to speedy results from our electronic resources that response
times of more that just a few seconds cause us to become impatient!
2. Cheaper? There is still a great debate going on about the cost of technology. Are the costs of
electronic resources (subscribing to or purchasing them, as well as providing the appropriate
equipment for access) lower than the one-time purchase costs for books, plus the expense of
updating them and providing space for them on library shelves?

2. In fact, comprehensive analyses on the subject seem to demonstrate that it is less expensive to
buy a good computer, get a fast Internet connection, and subscribe to several databases than it
is to purchase and store range after range of books. As the price of computers and subscriptions
decrease thanks to wider adoption, the trend curves make this argument continuously stronger. 4
So the cost argument is definitively a reason why many have opted for the switch to electronic
resources!
3. Better? Here we need to consider by which criteria we determine whether, or which,
electronic resources are superior to print for legal research.
It seems that the availability of high-quality and up-to-date information continuously improves
thanks to the broadening adoption of digital technology and broadband connectivity.
The growth of the Internet and computerized research during the past two decades has
broadened both, the type of information courts rely on and the type of research law firms
routinely undertake. 5
?? Infinite resources - How can we find common rules? ??
Until the rise of computerized research, attorneys, professors, and paralegals all used the same
tools for their legal research, reading page after page of annotations in the digests to find
authorities, cases, and statutes, with which to craft legal arguments for their clients. Arguments
for each side were based on the same types of authorities, generally found in the same way.
To the contrary, the research results of today's legal researchers feature a dizzying array of
resources gleaned from widespread searching of electronic resources. Documents that were
once all but unknown or available only to a select few can now be located and read by almost
anyone with a computer.
?? A sea change affecting the structure of American law ??
This growing choice of technological tools with which to retrieve, sort, and manage the staggering
amount of available information affect the very structure of American law, not merely how
lawyers and paralegals research the law. 6
As a result, if legal researchers working on the same issues define the problems in different ways
at the outset of their research, they might never reach that core of common rules or cases that
would have been identified readily within the closed universe of the digest and print resources.
?? Could search results be better organized? ??
Results found via the computer, based on ?search terms?, are usually a mixture of primary and
secondary authorities, special interest statements, and other types of materials.
These results are often not organized in a meaningful way, they do not give structure and
guidance to the applicable rules and/or report comprehensively the accepted principles and
theories of the field. On the contrary, the bulk of information used in print research consisted of

3. information pre-assembled and organized by other legal professionals.
Thus, with the rise of technology, are we making too many compromises, are we choosing
faster, and cheaper against better?
It should be possible to have all three, by preserving the speed and cost-savings of electronic
research while creating a pre-organized legal research system that does not involve
individualizing results so as to make communication between parties very difficult.
However, to achieve that, we'll need the Lexis Nexis and West of the future (and why not a start-
up launched by a paralegal?) to invent the new digests.
1 Felix Frankfurter, The Conditions for, and the Aims and Methods of, Legal Research, 15 Iowa
L. Rev. 129, 134 (1930). See generally on the subject, Sarah Valentine, Legal Research as a
Fundamental Skill: A Lifeboat for Students and Law Schools, 39 U. Balt. L. Rev. 173 (2009).
2 Theodore A. Potter, A New Twist on an Old Plot: Legal Research Is a Strategy, Not a Format,
92 Law Libr. J. 287, 290 (2000) (focus in legal research teaching should be on ?good research
strategy?). See also, Barbara Bintliff, Context and Legal Research, 99 Law Libr. J. 249, 258
(2007) (?Effective legal research starts within a sophisticated context of background information
and knowledge. Considerable analysis and experience are required to understand the meaning
and relative importance of authorities, and then to use them to craft a persuasive argument.?)
3 Robert C. Berring, Collapse of the Structure of the Legal Research Universe: The Imperative of
digital information, 69 Wash. L. Rev. 9, 12?13 (1994).
4 See, e.g.,Carol Hansen Montgomery & Donald W. King, Comparing Library and User Related
Costs of Print and Electronic Journal Collections: A First Step Towards a Comprehensive
Analysis, D-Lib Mag., Oct. 2002.
5 Coleen M. Barger, On the Internet, Nobody Knows You're a Judge: Appellate Courts' Use of
Internet Materials, 4 J. App. Prac. & Process 417, 422?28 (2002).
6 Katrina Fischer Kuh,Electronically Manufactured Law, 22 harv. J.L. & Tech. 223, 226 (2008)
(arguing that electronic legal research results in an increased diversity in the selection of the
legal theories through which to conceptualize facts, which leads to advancement of marginal
cases, theories, and arguments).
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