About This Book

This open educational resource (OER) textbook was created to support teaching and learning legal research in an online environment. The project was funded by a grant from Queen’s University Library, designed to support the creation or adaptation of a primary educational resource for a course of study at Queen’s University.

Legal Research Online © 2024 by Christa Bracci & Erica Friesen is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 

How It Started

The process of legal research and the way that process is taught have changed substantially over the past twenty years. The title of this book explicitly positions legal research as an online activity but this has not always been the case. For many teachers and practitioners, information seeking was learned and performed using print volumes, sometimes many at a time, spread out on law library workroom tables. Although this approach is no longer the norm, the influence of print culture persists: it is evident in the information seeking habits of many who are the practice supervisors of today’s students and early associates, as well as in some of the more subtle aspects of information seeking in an online environment. Nevertheless, legal research can now be accomplished almost entirely using online access points — even if those access points lead to print resources.

As information seeking diverges from the print environment, legal research instruction is also evolving to specifically address information seeking in an online environment. In particular, students of legal research must learn strategies for managing concerns endemic to the online environment: a huge volume of available legal and relevant non-legal information; the ever-expanding number of access points for that information; and the regular appearance of new technologies designed to assist in the information seeking process. Subscription service training as delivered by our product representatives at the start of every school year is still necessary — but is no longer sufficient.

Further, we have seen in our classrooms that students are not only struggling to keep up with the range of online access points and basic techniques for online research; they also have little to no basis for critically assessing resources that do not emanate from traditional publishing houses. Even with traditional sources, in the ambient noise produced by the volume of available information and the ease of access to that information online, students seem to have lost sight of some of the more fundamental aspects of good legal research, such as using multiple techniques to access and filter information; matching the type of resource to the nature of the legal problem; locating and retrieving information while keeping costs low; assessing whether a resource is authoritative, and being able to say why or why not. In other words, on top of the standard legal research curriculum, students also need to build information literacy skills to help them navigate legal information seeking in the online environment.

How It’s Going

Initially, the shift from print to online culture in legal research unfolded slowly, over a period of decades. But both the COVID-19 pandemic as well as recent technological advances have been like rocket fuel for that shift. During the pandemic, many university libraries shut down. Teaching and information seeking moved almost entirely online. Instructors and university administrators struggled with the administrative challenges generated by the shift, but all parties, including law students, law librarians and lawyers, developed new strategies for communication, instruction, and research. In the midst of this, we also saw a broad take-up of newer technologies — like Zoom — which became standard operational modalities almost overnight. Many law-school based legal research courses moved (almost) seamlessly online, and instructors took the opportunity to innovate and explore how their teaching practice might focus on the utility and limitations of online access points, tools, and techniques.

The shift is ongoing — and its repercussions will be felt for years. For example, when library physical spaces closed during the pandemic, many students developed — or entrenched — a blind spot for resources not available in digital or eBook format. Clearly this is not optimal for comprehensive research, but it is a reality that instructors must now address. Further, there is greater urgency for students as well as practitioners to successfully integrate technological advances into their practice skill set.^[1] Particularly for law students, some rational strategy must be taught for managing these demands.

As a first step, it seemed to us as authors that there was a need for a text that explicitly acknowledged these trends in legal information seeking, one that would meet learners where they are: online. As we approached the challenge to create such a text, we decided that isolating the information seeking process^[2] from the larger legal problem solving paradigm would allow us to foreground concepts in legal information literacy and critical assessment of legal information. To this end, we have adopted the phrase “information seeking” — as distinct from information analysis and synthesis — to describe and identify this element of legal problem solving. Even though this is only part of the legal problem solving process, there is plenty to talk about here. Further to the discussion above, another of the repercussions we’ve noted is that when given a choice, students restrict their information seeking almost exclusively to online access points. Yet, students almost universally report an experience of becoming overwhelmed early in the research process by too much information. The fear of “going down rabbit holes” with no particular purpose in mind causes anxiety. And when that anxiety manifests, it robs students of the time and focus needed for the critical assessment, synthesis, and analysis of legal information that is essential to effective legal problem solving.

What Now?

Thus, we set out to design a text that would fill the gap in our instructional toolkit. We aimed to address the contemporary concerns in teaching and learning legal information seeking that stem from an online process. Our approach was guided by best practices in legal research pedagogy, which has advanced considerably in the last 20–30 years, as seen through the lens of current technology. The result, we hope, is a text that is compatible with best practices in legal research pedagogy — active and and collaborative learning, “flipped” classrooms that embrace a process approach to teaching legal research and that support authentic, problem-based, “messy” learning — but also one which moves information seeking along the timeline into the contemporary online environment and addresses the issues found there. 

Wherever possible, we have attempted to avoid reproducing foundational information such as the structure of the court system, the jurisdictional divisions of power, and the legislative process. This information already exists in many fine instructional texts on which we rely in our own classrooms. Instead we chose to focus more directly on those aspects of research that are directly impacted by the online environment. In that sense, this text is not a standalone volume, and should be read together with other more foundational material.

In the same vein, we see this text as an accompaniment to a well-structured legal research classroom experience. Having read the description of basic tools and techniques for online legal research, students should then be prepared to attend a class where they are asked to apply those tools and techniques within the context of problem-based online information seeking.

Finally, we know that the online legal research landscape changes rapidly and without warning. Printed texts on online legal research, which are tied to a traditional publication cycle, can fall out of date within mere weeks or months of publication. For example, screenshots from the research services (Westlaw, CanLII, Lexis) — so carefully chosen, placed, and captioned — are often quickly invalidated by the launch of a new user interface. Our approach to avoid this issue is two-fold. First, we expect that the OER format (open educational resource, or free access textbook) of this text will allow more regular and responsive updating. But further, we have also simply chosen to avoid the use of service screenshots in this text wherever possible. To fill this gap, we invite users to consider the Queen’s Law Library Legal Research Manual, which is openly available, regularly updated, and provides a more step-by-step description of some of the techniques and tools described here.

Who this book is for

Substantively, this text addresses both traditional and non-traditional sources of legal information. We augment this discussion with what we believe is essential contextual understanding in the areas of database and information literacy, including professional responsibilities around technological competence, basic artificial intelligence (AI) literacy, and ethical considerations in online information seeking. Although the utility of such a text would largely be confined to the academic environment, we believe this book may have a slightly broader application.

First, this book may be useful for those who learned legal research when it was taught primarily from and within the print environment. So much has changed since computer-assisted legal research became the norm. For those whose understanding of legal research tools and techniques precedes that paradigm shift, this text may provide something of an introduction to the contemporary online research environment.

Of course, this book is also meant to be useful for instructors of legal research, whether their background is in librarianship, legal practice, or both. Legal educators have witnessed the slow shift from print to online but have had little comprehensive support in terms of teaching materials. This text seeks to fill some of that gap by presenting in a single text the concepts and related learning outcomes that are the foundation for credible competence in online legal research. Our hope is that by choosing an OER format, we create a space for this conversation to expand and include our colleagues across other institutions. We look forward to hearing about what you do with the text, based on its availability through a Creative Commons license.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, we wrote this text with our students in mind. As legal educators, our primary goal is to teach students to successfully manage the huge volume of legal information currently available to them online; to prepare them to be savvy consumers of legal information, and capable creators of innovative legal solutions for their clients.