With all these great advantages – email connectivity, jurisprudence and legal law, and non-traditional legal research papers – aren`t all lawyers online today? In this author`s experience, there are essentially three main barriers to market entry: (1) complexity or learning curve, (2) lack of critical mass, and (3) lack of a killer app. Clearinghouse for Subject-Oriented Internet Resource Guides (research guides on all sorts of topics, including law, many with hyperlinks) www.lib.umich.edu/chouse/chhome.html The cost of internet access is quite low, usually around a dollar per hour, although hourly packages can be purchased at discounted prices. As more and more legal resources are added to the web – and the ubiquity of email communication increases – this accusation is likely to become trivial. This is especially true when the Web reaches its potential and duplicates many research resources traditionally served only by a comprehensive paper legal library. Beyond the question of whether the internet is a good place for traditional legal research, lies the truly exciting story of this revolution. After all, lawyers need to know both the facts and the law, and the internet is a huge reservoir of factual information, much of which is very current. As a result, lawyers now have access to types of information they never had before. Before using the Internet for legal research, determine whether the information you are looking for is available in paper form in your library or electronically on LEXIS, WESTLAW, CD-ROM or another database. Note that it is possible to perform more complex searches through LEXIS, WESTLAW, and other subscription databases than to use some of the free Internet resources.
And remember that sometimes it`s more effective to find a horn book or treatise on your topic, or a good magazine article, before turning to the Internet. It might be cheaper in terms of time, results, etc. NOT to use the internet. It depends on what you are looking for. When it comes to standard crimes, contracts, companies, securities, antitrust issues and you need general information, you can get useful information faster from the Internet. Legal advice in Google Scholar is provided for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a substitute for legal advice from a licensed attorney. Google™ does not guarantee the completeness or accuracy of the information. The good news here is that there are many online legal research tools that offer the highest level of content and reliability that lawyers need. Most of these legal research providers are open and clear about the content they offer and how often their respective legal libraries are updated – which goes a long way in ensuring that your legal research is sound. Note: When “search engines” are specified in this article, they are a number of free and open online Internet search engines available to the public, such as Google.
It does not refer to subscription-based online legal research providers, most of which also have strong online law libraries. You can read more about this distinction later in this article. It`s a simple matter of trust in the data. You may be shocked (panting!) when you realize that not all information on the internet is reliable. A lawyer`s legal research tools should provide reliable legal acts and court documents from an up-to-date online legal library. On the research side, skeptical lawyers want to know if the Internet is already replacing LEXIS or Westlaw. This is not the case. However, there are now masses of information from traditional legal research on the Internet: case law, legal documents, agency decisions, etc. It`s safe to say that a case, law, or agency decision you`ve been referring to in the past week is probably somewhere on the internet.
Is it all there? Is Lol well organized and easy to find? Lol Internet is a cost-effective alternative to using commercial databases such as LEXIS and WESTLAW to find primary legal documents such as U.S. federal and state laws, laws, cases, and regulations. Sometimes these documents are available on the Internet more quickly than on LEXIS and WESTLAW (especially if they relate to cyberspace/Internet law, computer law, the First Amendment and censorship, communications law, intellectual property, major criminal trials, antitrust, elections, or other topical issues). And sometimes, the Internet is the only place where you can find primary documents, for example, laws and jurisprudence from abroad, contracts with countries other than the United States. Countries and documents in areas of law traditionally underrepresented in print and electronic legal publications (Women and Law, Human Rights, Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Rights, Law and Literature, Roman Law, etc.), and non-legal materials relevant to legal work or interdisciplinary research.