Do New Attorneys Have The Skills? Tobin A. Sparling Associate Professor South Texas College of Law

2007 ABA Legal Technology Survey ■Percentage of attorneys who regularly use... ●Print Resources – 52%. ▪ 40% under age 40. ▪ 60% over 50. ●Fee-Based Internet Resources – 58%. ▪ 73% under age 40. ▪ 46% over age 50. ●Free Internet Resources – 48%. ●CD-ROM (or other removable media formats) – 11%.

Competency of Summer & First-Year Associates ■Howland & Lewis’ survey of law firm librarians in eight major cities: ●Basic Research Skills ▪ Over 50% of summer associates less than satisfactory. ▪ At least 34% of first-years less than satisfactory. ●Specific Subject Matter Research Skills ▪ 64% of summer associates less than satisfactory. ▪ 48% of first-years less than satisfactory. Joan S. Howland & Nancy J. Lewis, The Effectiveness of Law School Legal Research Training Programs, 40 J. Legal Educ. 381 (1990).

ABA’s MacCrate Report ■Purpose: To refocus legal education from teaching students to “think like a lawyer to teaching them to act (or function) as a lawyer.” ■Result: The creation of formal legal research & writing programs in law schools nationwide.

Competency of First-Year Associates ■Strubbe & Stiverson’s survey of attorneys and law firm librarians in the Chicago area: Are new attorneys able to research effectively and efficiently prior to in-house training? ●Overall research % cannot. ●Print research % cannot. ●Electronic research % cannot. Mary Rose Strubbe & Keith Stiverson, The Future of Legal Research, Law Librarian Survey, handout accompanying Laurel Oates & Mary Rose Strubbe, Legal Research in the 21 st Century, Legal Writing Institute Conference (2006), available at

Competency of First-Year Associates (continued) ■Skills found lacking: ●Defining or narrowing issues with secondary sources – 88.6%. ●Finding relevant sources efficiently – 65.9%. ●Recognizing irrelevant sources – 36.4%. ●Awareness of authority hierarchy – 43.2%. ●Updating research accurately and effectively – 47.7%. ●Other – 22.7%.

Why The Continuing Problem? ■ Legal Education Generally. ●Continued undervaluing of skills instruction.

Why The Continuing Problem? (continued) ■Legal Research & Writing Instruction Specifically. ●Emphasis upon legal writing at the expense of legal research. ●Emphasis upon one medium of legal research at the expense of another (electronic vs. paper or paper vs. electronic). ●Teaching hampered by lack of uniformity of electronic media. ●De-emphasis of law librarians as providers of legal research instruction.

Why The Continuing Problem? (continued) ■The Google Effect. ●Law students’ unfamiliarity with paper media, their features, and search methodology (indexes, tables of contents, etc.) ▪ 73% of college students use the internet more than they use the library for information retrieval. (Pew Internet & American Life Project.) Pew Internet & American Life Project, available at

The Google Effect (continued) ●Ease and seductiveness of the quick key-word search and corresponding unattractiveness of more thought- or labor-intensive media, notwithstanding the results. (Peoples’ survey of 28 second- and third-year law students’ research preferences.) ▪ Students rated electronic key-word searching more highly than other techniques even when the results were less successful. ▪ Digests were ranked lowest even when students had the greatest success using them. ▪ Students ranked KeySearch lower than electronic key- word searches due to difficulty of use. Lee F. Peoples, The Death of the Digest & the Pitfalls of Electronic Research: What Is the Modern Researcher to Do?, 97 Law Libr. J. 661 (2005).

The Google Effect (continued) ■False confidence in search results and in the comprehensiveness of the search engine. ●Students’ correlation of quick hits with the validity of the search results. ▪ Failure to dig deeply. ▪ Tendency to give up if they don’t quickly find what they are looking for. ▪ View of the law as a system based on unique factual situations as opposed to one founded on identifiable rules and principles.

Why The Continuing Problem? (continued) ■Lexis and Westlaw Instruction. ●Difficulty in conveying a realistic sense of the costs of Lexis and Westlaw research. ●Difficulty in monitoring what students are doing. ●Over-dependence on vendors for instruction.

What to Do? ■Recognize that the current generation of attorneys approaches research differently than prior generations and comes with different expectations. ■Realistically appraise our (teachers’, librarians’, senior attorneys’) expectations. ■Clearly convey our expectations to law students / junior attorneys. ■Emphasize electronic search methodology in legal research courses and strike a better balance between paper and electronic media.

What to Do? (continued) ■Enthusiastically embrace and master new developments in legal research and promote them to law students / junior attorneys. ■Develop clear and arresting examples to show law students / junior attorneys the benefits as well as the shortcomings of all of the research media we expect them to use. ■Promote law school reference librarians as resources for aid in electronic search methodologies. ■Maintain and enforce standards.