Editor’s note: This post is from Cindy Carlson, a librarian relations manager at West.
There are many challenges involved in bridging the gap between what law students learn about legal research and what new attorneys need to know. I attended a session on this topic at the 2009 AALL Annual Meeting in Washington, D.C. that brought several perspectives.
The session was titled Emerging from the Cocoon: Innovative Ways to Re-teach Legal Research to Externs & Summer Associates.
Dragomir Cosanici from the Louisiana State University, Paul M. Hebert Law Center was first to present and, as an academic, immediately addressed the main issue – there is no consistency of approach among law schools to teaching legal research.
Often it’s done in the first year as part of the writing program, Cosanici said. Sometimes it isn’t taught at all. And at some schools there is an option for students to take a course taught by law librarians that is research-specific.
Unfortunately, even in that last and best-case scenario, the credit given is small and the classes are often of limited size and hard to get into. So, while academic law librarians are doing their best with the resources they have, their options are limited. Cosanici’s suggestion was that law schools utilize some of the technology they have available for remote teaching to help fill the gap.
His approach was to offer a three part program as part of the package of managing externships:
1. Before a student goes to an internship, whatever the environment, somehow give them real world research experience. Many cities offer programs where one or more schools work together to offer a legal research skills bootcamp. Cosanici also incorporates a relatively simple writing assignment for a memo into his research-based classes to give students an idea how one skill must feed into the other.
2. During an internship, offer an online course with hypotheticals and let all the students see one another’s responses in a forum about the best ways to get at research answers.
3. After, follow-up with the option for self-paced tutorials on specific practice area topics to help the students familiarize themselves with tools they’ll need when they enter the working world.
Holly Lakatos, a court librarian for the Court of Appeal, 3rd Appellate District, also spoke in this session. She works with judicial externs who work up to 20 hours a week but who stay for indeterminate periods of time, so she has no opportunity to round everyone up for a single training.
Instead, she must rely on a short orientation and teachable moments.
She said she has learned to set expectations at the hiring point and to glean suggestions from exit interviews to improve her training. First, she needs every new intern to have a basic skill set. They must be able to:
1. Find primary law in print and online. As a cash-strapped court library, many sources are still only available there in print.
2. Shepardize. Since Lexis is the official publisher in her court’s jurisdiction, that’s what her student employees need to know.
3. Cite using the appropriate format. Often students learn blue book or another general citation format, but in California, the citation rules differ slightly. And while they work on the court, the local format is what they need to use and know.
4. Use a library catalog to find secondary materials.
Her library has an online catalog and a paper catalog, so interns have to know how to field search and understand how to navigate a paper catalog. Paper catalogs are not so common these days, but the real sticking point is that often new interns do not even understand the basic underpinnings of the Library of Congress classification system.
They don’t know, for instance, that “K” means law, much less that “KF” is American law. Worse yet, they don’t understand that books on similar topics will be shelved near one another.
During a recent library move, Lakatos worked with the space planners to arrange work areas in the library for student employees. Now, rather than scattered around the office where she rarely sees them, all the new researchers are nearby. She stops in briefly, but often, to ask what they are working on, how things are going and whether they have any questions. This was a terrific way for her to help make herself more familiar to them and to become more accessible, creating many more of those teachable moments.
At their departures, she always asks, “What’s the one thing you wish you had known when you started?” Some of her best training ideas and tip-sheets have come from their answers, and she has also created some self-paced tutorials for them to review as needed.
Abigail Ross, Keller & Heckman, spoke from the perspective of a medium size law firm manager, though her background in associate and summer associate training includes experiences in large firms as well.
Ross first noted that she has about 30 minutes with her interns and new associates for training and orientation, so her strategy is to find ways to grab and keep their attention while she covers the essentials.
Her best tool is the horror story.
While she noted that she doesn’t want to scare her interns and new associates away from using expensive tools, she wants them to:
1. Know when they should start with an alternative.
2. Use the online services with an awareness of the best approach for being cost effective.
She also wants them to feel free to come to her – the library is neutral territory and no question or problem is going to end up being discussed with anyone outside the library. In the interest of keeping things light and remaining approachable, Ross tries to tell her horror stories with a fun and humorous spin. As she explains to them, the idea is not to have them expect that they will be fired because of a $20,000 research bill, but that by telling these tales, she is hoping to ensure that they will not be fodder for the horror stories she tells in future.
Second, Ross said she needs to remind her new researchers that while they are unquestionably very intelligent (clearly they wouldn’t have been hired by her firm if they were not), they are new, and they are not practitioners, and there are many things they simply don’t know yet. To this end, she uses a quick quiz to highlight some of the potential pitfalls they may encounter and freely admits to including trick questions.
When they miss a question, there is an opportunity to teach them not only the answer, but also to remind them to keep an open mind about new insights, tools, approaches, and just plain facts they may not even know will be useful to them yet.
Third, Ross reminds new researchers that while there are many expectations about what they should know, there are also many things they are not expected to do on their own, like legislative research. While they may be totally capable of doing some of those things on their own, sometimes it doesn’t make financial sense for them to spend the time, and when that’s the case, they have a specialist in the library to call on.
Last, she reminds them that she is a law librarian because she loves research, and she wants to help them succeed. That being the case, she hopes to persuade them that coming to her for help and advice is one of the best research choices they can make.
Barbara Gabor, speaking as a large law firm librarian – from WilmerHale – rounded out the discussion in this session. Even in a large firm, she works under similar limitations about time and access to new researchers for training. While they often rely on recordings of training sessions and self-paced tutorials to create opportunities for learning beyond initial orientations, Gabor noted that at her firm, one approach that has worked particularly well has been to assign librarian mentors to her new researchers.
Each librarian follows-up within the first couple weeks of orientation with a little more information and a personal visit where possible (attorneys in another country or on the opposite coast get phone calls or see a librarian through the video conferencing system).
Training at her firm is viewed as ongoing, so they are constantly looking at new tools and approaches to keep learning fresh and accessible.
Additionally, she pointed out that while each working environment presents some unique challenges for coping with a knowledge gap from incoming law school students, there is quite a bit of common ground.
More collaborations among the groups is to be encouraged. Reach out to your local law school library, ask if they’d like to have you come in to present on how your environment works. Take advantage of shared resources that AALL offers, like the partnership AALL has formed with CALI to provide all of its member librarians with access to CALI Lessons.
Though there is better understanding now about how law school creates attorneys who are great at theory and building arguments but who are short on some essential practitioner skills, we are all still struggling with addressing that gap.
Working together and sharing our best ideas and most successful techniques can help us create legal research butterflies out of the sheltered students who arrive at our offices just beginning to stretch their wings.
Cindy Carlson
Librarian Relations Manager
West
Posted by Kevin Hunt in:
In Practice | Practice tips |
