ALL-SIS Advanced Legal Research Roundtable Results

COURSE MATERIALS & TEACHING METHODS

1. Would you be willing to share your research exercises in the Legal Research Sourcebook? Why or Why not?

• Most did not know about the Legal Research Sourcebook, but are willing to share their research exercises. They think it is a good idea.
• People at my table were largely unaware of the Sourcebook but seemed interested in checking it out.
• Most members had not shared and a few were not aware of the Sourcebook. Several would be willing to share. Concerns about sharing included:  fear that clarification would be needed; embarrassment about mistakes; getting consent in team teaching situations; library specific nature of exercises; lack of usefulness due to passage of time from event prompting exercise preparation.

2. What are some effective ways of teaching small groups legal research without using PowerPoint?

• Some effective ways of teaching small groups legal research without using PowerPoint:
  • Live internet demo
  • CALI
  • TWEN
  • “Clicks” technology - not very well-received by students mainly because of the way the classroom was set up, which hindered the use of the technology

3. Do you think that ALR instructors have a good grasp of what types of legal research practicing attorneys will need to perform? If not, how can they improve their understanding?

• Most agreed there was a need for improvement in this area. Several suggested that providing reference assistance helps. Others had practicing attorneys come as guest speakers come to their classes. (However, there was some concern that some practicing attorneys would say they don’t do research anymore.) Some hoped to participate in exchanges. Some continued to do contract work as a way to stay in touch with the issues. About half of the librarians had worked as attorneys, and these librarians felt that that work was very helpful to them in teaching legal research and understanding needs of practicing attorneys. One librarian mentioned that it was important to remember that not all law students went to big firms, so that law practice models should encompass more than one type of practice.
• Georgetown’s Electronic Services/Reference Librarian, Bill Taylor, has recently undertaken a research project in order to find out how well-equipped recent law school graduates are in terms of doing legal research. Recent graduates, young associates, judges, law librarians were interviewed. The report of that research will be of great use. One Georgetown librarian, Chris Knott, talked about his 1-credit Practical Research course which deals with the structure of legal research - more about the process than bibliographic.
• One participant had done an informal survey of law firm librarians, who indicated that the areas in which new or summer associates were least prepared to do research were legislative history and administrative law. Another participant who went from a firm to academia concurred. (More on this below under Course Content.) It was noted that statutes and regulations - and the relationship between them - are very confusing areas for students.
• Some require interviewing an attorney about legal research.
• Many survey students after summer clerkships to get an idea of what research they did.

4. Is your course taught by one librarian or by a team of librarians? If taught by a team, how do you divide the duties?

• Most ALR courses are team-taught. Some teams were made up of only two instructors. In this case, the two instructors planned and graded everything. There was some discussion about the duplication of effort required when both instructors grade each exercise. Other teams were composed of multiple members of the library staff. In the case of multiple members, some were assigned topics/responsibilities and others simply sat down and discussed duties prior to class. The primary difficulty discussed with team teaching was the assignment of grades (either letter or P/F).
• One librarian thought that team teaching is better for the students because of different teaching styles. At this point, the discussion turned to Westlaw and Lexis training. There were mixed feelings about inviting Westlaw and Lexis trainers to do the training:
• Pros:
• They know the pricing structure.
• They know what new changes are coming.
• Cons:
• Nuances not covered;
• Hard to tie the training sessions by Westlaw/Lexis trainer to the assignments.
• The group was relatively evenly split on whether the ALR course at their institution was team taught or taught by individual librarians.

5. What approach do you use for drafting class exercises and simulations? Do you use canned exercises or do you draft your own? If you draft your own, is there a particular method you use to come up with the questions?

• All of those who commented created their own questions by:
• Reverse-engineering: find an interesting topic and create questions that cover most aspects of legal research;
• In order to find good topics:
  • Keep a file of current affairs
  • Seton Hall Circuit Review’s section on circuit splits is a good source (http://law.shu.edu/journals/circuitreview/)
  • Use research memos kept during law-practice years
• Start off from the desired answer in drafting exercises and work backwards.
• All group members agreed that they look at the canned exercises but draft their own. A variety of methods for drafting questions were suggested including:  reading National Law Journal and adjusting facts for hypotheticals. Another idea mentioned was checking the briefs for “big” cases, examining the issues and facts, and using these as the basis for class exercises and assignments. Another librarian mentioned using the Federal Register or newspapers such as the Wall Street Journal for ideas. Other ideas included reference questions as sources of hypotheticals; using practicing attorney contacts to suggest possible issues from ongoing cases, and looking at other ALR websites.
• The group discussed the desirability of using more open-ended rather than “treasure hunt” assignments but commented that it was time consuming to develop those types of problems. Most of the participants used some variation of the “Pathfinder” as their major course assignment. One participant described a “Research Diary” with five chapters (secondary sources, statutes, etc.) in which the students describe the research process on a topic of their choice. The difficulty of balancing the more bibliographic with the “process” approach was discussed. One participant described using an assessment at the beginning of the course, then giving a similar test at the end to enable students to see how much they had learned.
• Hastings has a live web site for research exercises.

6. Do you use a published textbook? If so, what is your choice of text? Why? If you are not happy with your textbook what would you like to see in a text?

• Uses a textbook he co-wrote
• Uses various articles
• Uses Legal Research Illustrated
• Uses Where the Law Is
• Four participants who teach topical ALR courses (e.g., immigration law research, health law research) assigned reading materials prepared in-house. One who teaches tax law research assigns readings from Gail Richmond’s Federal Tax Research: Guide to Materials and Techniques, but does not require students to purchase it.
• One participant who teaches general ALR switched from Cohen & Berring’s How to Find the Law to Jacobstein and Mersky’s Fundamentals of Legal Research due to concerns about the first book’s currency; this participant later switched to Jacobstein & Mersky’s Legal Research Illustrated because as a paperback it is less expensive for students.
• Nutshell for legal research is often used as text; Sloan, Kunz, and Nolo came up as well.
• There is a new ALR textbook by Jody Armstrong called Where the Law Is.
• The Sloan book is used at one school. However, there is some question whether the students really read it. Mersky is used at another school. Some like Berring’s Finding the Law. Most do not have one text but instead place a number of textbooks on reserve or use their course website to post articles. One group member expressed the view that it is a skills course and the students learn by doing. As a result, she does not use a text.

What would you like to see in a text:

• Explains how things fit together without getting into excruciating bibliographic details.

COURSE CONTENT

1. How much time do you spend in your advanced legal research course reviewing material the students should have learned as first years? For those who have to spend a significant amount of time reviewing first-year materials, who teaches your first-years legal research:  librarians, writing instructors, or students?

• First few weeks
• Assume they don’t know anything
• 1 week
• Use a questionnaire to determine how much they know
• Participants concurred that a great deal of remedial work is usually necessary in the advanced course and that first year students don’t often absorb the research instruction very well.
• Many spend a significant amount of time reviewing basics of legal research. Those schools where librarians teach first years don’t tend to do that though.
• Most members of the group agreed that they spend a significant portion of the ALR course (up to 50%) reviewing materials that should have been learned the first year. The general perception was that most first year research programs “barely introduced the students to the library.” This was in part due to the fact that librarians were not responsible for first-year legal research programs. Great sympathy was expressed to the university which had student instructors for first-year research. The majority of the group members represented schools in which adjunct faculty taught the first year research. Some sentiment was expressed that the adjunct faculty were often practicing attorneys that were taking a break from practice due to family concerns and were perhaps distracted by other issues.
• Two participants regularly use ungraded quizes on the first day of class to see what students already know, and go over the answers in class as a form of review. One of these participants pulls questions from his first year legal research exam. The other participant noted that she’s careful not to make the quiz too elaborate because she doesn’t want students to drop the class after the first day!

2. What are the advantages/disadvantages of teaching topic-specific courses rather than survey courses? If you have taught a 1 credit or “compressed” advanced legal research course, what has your experience been?

• One librarian’s experience of teaching a 1 credit compressed online legal research course: Students complained of too much work
• The group discussed the teaching of legislative history - which one participant commented was a very common type of assignment for summer or new associates. The consensus was that it’s still important to include fairly extensive coverage of legislative history in advanced legal research courses, in spite of some publicized negative comments by U.S. Supreme Court justices that it’s not a legitimate tool for statutory interpretation. A couple of participants had used some non-traditional ways of teaching legislative history - such as bringing in a guest speaker who worked for the state assembly. Another participant commented that she had tried to teach it along with a class on statutory drafting, but that approach didn’t work very well.
• Some discussion of special needs of research instruction for LLM programs (some with many foreign students) and clinical programs took place.
• One of the primary advantages of topic specific courses is that students are able to select which class they wish to enroll in. As a result, the students either have an interest in the topic or are aware that this is a topic in which their future employer is interested.
• The representatives from the University of Arizona shared their experience with a compressed class. At Arizona, the class has been taught during the break between semesters. It is a week long course that runs from 9 A.M. to 5 P.M. The course is offered on a Pass/Fail basis. Because of the scheduling, it is difficult to have assigned reading or exercises. Attendance is the primary means of evaluating the students.
• 6 out of about 10 participants at our table had taught specialized legal research courses. One participant, whose immigration law research course is tied to a substantive course on immigration law, felt that it was an advantage that she could create research problems from materials that would be covered in the substantive class. She noted that it is extremely important to get the support of the faculty member when you tie a research class to a substantive class.
• One advantage of specialized research classes that all participants agreed on was that students in specialized research classes are usually very interested in the subject you have them researching.
• One disadvantage of specialized legal research classes is that for certain subjects it is hard to find enough students to fill a class.

3. What role, if any, does non-law or interdisciplinary research instruction play in your advanced legal research course(s)? What approaches have you employed to introduce law students to research in other disciplines?

• Company/business research is important
  • Spend some ALR class time on it
  • Introduce different databases that have the usual info needed in law firm practice
• Most participants agreed that they see advantages to interdisciplinary courses and suggested that the faculty are often involved in trying to incorporate such instruction. However, no specific examples were discussed.
• One librarian commented:  Different topical courses are taught in her law school, but they are survey courses in disguise.
• Among the non-legal or law-related materials that people taught were statistical sources and business/corporate information.
• At our table it was most common to teach non-law research in specialized ALR classes such as health law research and business law research. One participant who teaches health law research teaches students about medical literature databases and finds that students like this since they can use these databases to research their own health concerns and those of their family members! Another, who has taught business law research, taught her students the basics of company research. One participant who teaches a survey course takes a one-on-one approach to teaching non-law research when he meets with students about their course projects.

4. How important is it to include international legal research in advanced legal survey courses if no specific course in international law research is offered?

• Important even with a stand-alone international legal research course. It is introduced, with a focus on treaty research, towards the end of the ALR course.
• Most of the represented schools offered a specific course on international research. There was not a great deal of discussion on the importance of including the topic in an ALR course; however, one individual did comment that because of the limits placed on enrollment in such a course, it might be seen as essential to include this topic in an ALR course.
• Answers to the question of whether international legal research should be covered in an advanced legal research course varied widely. Some participants at the table taught in LLM programs that influenced the choice of topics covered.
• The participants at our table seemed to agree that it is important to cover at least U.S. treaty research. Two participants also felt that it was important to talk about comparative law, and to educate their students on the fact that common law is only one possible legal system. The participant who teaches immigration law research noted that international law research is an essential component of her course. There were two suggestions for sources of reading materials on international and foreign law topics: articles on LLRX (which the recommender noted make good handouts) and research guides on the NYU law library web site.

5. Do you use the CALI materials? If yes, do you require that students complete any particular lessons, or that they complete several unspecified legal research lessons?

• Students tend to like subject-specific CALI lessons rather than the general legal research lessons
• Several ALR instructors recommended CALI lessons but did not require completion. Others do require completion of lessons and reporting of scores. One instructor commented that she had reviewed the CALI lesson on administrative law for possible inclusion in her class. She decided not to include the lesson because of the time (at least one and one-half hours) required to complete the lesson. She felt it was not appropriate to require the students to put that much time into a single lesson and then also require completion of a local exercise which more closely fit the course.
• CALI lessons tend to be too bibliographic.
• One participant indicated that she had used CALI lessons as a substitute for background readings in her course.

6. Are there legal research topics that should be covered by CALI lessons but are not at this time?

• Business research
• Most realized that CALI had recently added materials. They agreed that they would need to further review CALI lessons before making recommendations about additional topics.

ELECTRONIC RESEARCH

1. How do you present the online legal research component of your cours(es)? For example, do you integrate print and electronic by topic, or do you separate your discussion by format? Do you discuss Internet research in the context of online research systems? Why/why not?

• Print/online all integrated
• The group was split between those who try to integrate print and online from the start and those who present print sources first and limit use of online sources until later in the semester.
• Several indicated that they do separate discussion by format. For example, the representative from one school said they discuss “low rent law” for those that may be going into public service and may not have access to a great deal of electronic databases. Most representatives agreed that they do discuss Internet research as well. Two individuals specifically mentioned instruction on LexisOne was provided.

2. Do company vendors do your online training - alone or in conjunction with the librarians? Would you consider asking law firm librarians to participate in the training? What advantages and/or drawbacks have you experienced with your current approach(s)?

• One librarian invited CCH and Loislaw, but was not impressed by the teaching quality. There are benefits in asking vendors to do online training:
  • Knowledge of the cost, up-to-date developments of the products
  • Bring students up to a certain level so as to alleviate the teaching burden on the teaching librarians.
• Some ALR courses require Wexis certification. There was pretty much a split between ALR courses where instructors did Wexis training and those taught by vendors.
• Some participants had the vendor reps (after being involved in the introductory training for 1Ls) return to the advanced legal research course to cover billing practices and cost effective search techniques. Some had a law firm librarian come to their class for the same purpose. A couple of participants discussed having the reps “turn on” the cost feature while students were working online.
• Most of the schools represented used company vendors. However, the librarians observe vendor training to ensure that the vendor representatives do not get off track and provide basic research instruction. One instructor expressed the opinion that by the time the students are in ALR they should have already developed their CALR skills. As a result, she explains to students that they are responsible for knowing how to accomplish CALR and if they do not know how, they must sign up with the representatives to receive additional instruction. She indicated that this approach appears to be successful.
• Several participants have vendors come to teach online research, but different participants have vendors lecture on different topics. For example, one has vendors come to show students the basic features of the system, then has students do hands on exercises in the lab to compare the two services. One participant prefers to have vendors talk about sources students don’t normally consider, such as news databases and public records. One participant has the Lexis and Westlaw reps use the same problem to separately demonstrate their systems, then the participant discusses one impact of vendor consolidation: that sometimes the same source is better on one service than the other because one of them owns the source while the other licenses it.

3. How you incorporated blogs, newsfeeds, or aggregators into your courses? If so, what have you done, and what results have you seen?

• Two said yes
• Others think that they should be introduced in the context of current awareness.
• Little if no use of blogs.
• Most members of the groups have used RSS feeds. Lewis and Clark requires that students use a blog as part of their course.

4. Do you make a point to cover government and other high quality free sites that offer useful sources of electronic legal information?

• Yes
• One says he taught students how to evaluate web sites.

5. What kinds of electronic databases, services, products do you cover other than Lexis or Westlaw?

• BNA, CCH, almost all databases because we paid a lot of money for them
• HeinOnline, Pacer, LegalTrac, LOIS, BNA

EVALUATION

1. How do you evaluate your students?

2. What kind of tests, quizzes, etc. do you require?

• Individual research journal which can be the research log of a paper they are writing for another course (but most students write policy-related papers which do not lend well to show different types of legal research)
• Research guides as a final project (some are good, some are really crap, considering doing something else)
• Research project + class participation +presentation
• Pathfinders + a presentation + in class exams + take home exam
• Research plan + annotated bibliography + memorandum with footnote
• Take-home assignment + exam (1/3: multiple-choice; 1/3: short answers; 1/3: extremely difficult research questions, students have to describe how they would tackle them)
• The table was about evenly split between schools where the advanced legal research course was offered “Pass/fail” and those where the course was graded.
• In response to a question, no one indicated that they used graded CALI lessons

3. What kind of student work projects do you require?

• One person who reuses the same major problem year after year has students keep research journals and show their process.
• One participant described an approach in which he has students choose an article from a suggested reading list on research-related topics (examples he gave were legislative history; unpublished opinions; use of social sciences and use of Internet sources by judges; notion of precedent in constitutional law issues); students write a summary of the article and come to class prepared to lead a discussion on the topic. They are graded on this (as well as on the Research Diary - see above.)
• Most participants agreed that they continue to experiment with evaluation tools. The discussion was thus based on historical practice. - In one pass/fail course, only a good faith effort of attendance and some exercises are required. - In three courses, the students are required to prepare pathfinders. In one of these courses the pathfinder is a group project and the students then teach a class period using the pathfinder. In another course, students have short assignments in addition to the pathfinder. In the other course, students also have an open book/computer final exam. - In another course, students are required to prepare a memorandum and research logs. - In another past/fail course there are “very basic” assignments and a short answer final exam.
• Some participants have tried using class participation as a grade-distinguishing tool, but these participants agreed that it is difficult to get students to speak up in class. One participant requires students to do research outside of class on something in the news, then calls on people to talk about the process. Another participant, who requires her students to monitor a topical legal periodical throughout the term and write about what they read suggested that students could instead be required to discuss what they read in class.