Legal Research

Greg Lambert of 3 Geeks and a Law Blog has a thoughtful post on the future of legal research and the role of "free versus fee" sources:

The good and bad thing about legal research today is the fact that information is a commodity. This has created a conception that all information is online (and free) and can be found if you are a savvy enough researcher. Granted, there is an enormous amount of information available to legal researchers and a lot of it is free. That may be fine if you are writing a blog or even an article for a news organization. But, quick and easy and free information will not necessarily be viewed as authoritative by the courts.

I am emphatically not one of those librarians who gasps in horror at the idea of a legal researcher starting with a search engine. I think free legal research resources have a legitimate and important role in any attorney's legal research strategy, particularly at the beginning of a project.  But as Greg Lambert points out so eloquently, we are not at the point where we can rely on free sources for crucial legal research tasks like obtaining the most up-to-date version of a statute or verifying that a case is still good law.  It's great to be excited about what free resources can do to jumpstart a research project, but if you rely solely on free sources to write a brief or prepare a legal opinion for a client, you're on shaky ground. Like it or not, Lexis or Westlaw will need to be part of the thorough legal researcher's toolkit for awhile longer.