Academic Law Librarians are increasingly training students on CALR in part to limit marketing from vendors. However, by doing so, we may be ignoring the research realities in law firm environments. For law librarians in academia who have not recently practiced or have not been in a firm environment, the world of billing for online research may be a foreign concept. The major online vendors keep information on costs for firms almost unobtainable. Instead, they insist on training law students on the many features and databases available to them as law students, but fail to mention real world limited access and charges. Luckily, firm librarians and academic librarians are not so far removed from each other to share information on electronic research and “real world” billing practices.
Teaching CALR to Law Students was coordinated by Sara Kelley from Georgetown University Law Library and moderated by Susan Herrick from the University of Maryland at Baltimore, Thurgood Marshall Law Library. On the afternoon of Monday, July 10, Jennifer Murray, Librarian at Greenberg Traurig in Phoenix, Arizona, and Terry Psarras, Manager of Library Services at Carlton Fields in Tampa, Florida, illuminated the audience with strategies, tips and resources to pass on to law students. The program aimed at helping academic law librarians educate their law students about legal research and billing practices at firms. Some of the major topics covered were: Learning about online resources in law school, billable and non billable research, and costs.
According to Psarras, the addiction to Wexis begins in Law School. He compared Wexis usage in law school to free crack samples from the vendors. Because preferences for particular resources begin in law school, vendors attempt to attract students to their product immediately. However, what vendors fail to mention to students are the potential real world costs of the searches they are conducting. Instead, students are showered with gifts and freebies in an attempt to get them hooked on their product. Attempts by those interested in learning about costs, such as those teaching legal research, are often thwarted as vendors are not willing to disclose their pricing structure.
The main reason why costs of legal research in firms are difficult for vendors to disclose is because the costs are different from firm to firm. Firms can also be on combinations of fixed rate, transactional and hourly plans depending on the resources used. Murray described the downsides of fixed rate resources as including limitations on access, restrictions on usage, and fluctuations in price.
Another factor into the real costs of legal research is billing time. Psarras used the equation: Total Cost of Doing Research = Attorney billable time + any research tool cost. Billing policies of each firm are also different. Murray explained that law firms are businesses looking to make profits. Not passing on costs to clients for online research is not profitable as the research would become lost revenue. Firms try to come out even for research costs, but often are not able to do so.
Murray enlightened the audience with the differences between billable and non billable online research and how that relates to using alternatives to Wexis. First, usage of Wexis depends on whether or not the client is willing to pay for Wexis. If a client is unwilling to pay for Wexis research, then alternate resources are used. Different types of research also determine whether the time is billable or not. Generally, research for clients is billable and research on business development is not. Another factor is time spent on research and where the researcher is at in the research process. If no more time can be spent on Wexis, then because of costs and time limitations, the researcher may be forced to utilize different resources. Some alternate resources mentioned mentioned by Murray included Loislaw, Versuslaw, Casemaker, BNA, and CCH which had flat fees. Free and low cost options for research include LexisOne, Findlaw, and Pacer. Finally, students should also be aware of internal firm options for utilizing Wexis searches that are not billable.
Even though addiction to Wexis can be debilitating to the research of law students and lawyers, just as with any addiction, early intervention and education through legal research courses in law school can help prevent negative consequences.